Cibrarp  of the  theological  ^eroittarp 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


Mr, 


PRESENTED  BY 

Tristram  Johnson 


C_B  63 

BH\ 


\ 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/sevenagesbriefsiOObegb 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

“ That  valuable  public  servant , 
A  Gentleman  with  a  Duster 

— G.  K.  Chesterton. 

The  Mirrors  of  Downing  Street 

Some  Political  Reflections 


The  Glass  of  Fashion 

Studies  in  Religious  Personality 

Seven  Ages 

A  Narrative  of  the  Human  Mind 


SEVEN  AGES 


SEVEN  AGES 


V 


A  BRIEF  AND  SIMPLE  NARRATIVE  OF  THE  PILGRIM¬ 
AGE  OF  THE  HUMAN  MIND  AS  IT  HAS  AFFECTED  THE 
ENGLISH-SPEAKING  WORLD 


BY 

A  GENTLEMAN  WITH  A  DUSTER 


Author  of  “The  Mirrors  ofDowning  Street” 


✓ 


History  is  “ a  voice  forever  sounding  across  the  centuries  the 
laws  of  right  and  wrong.  Opinions  alter,  manners  change, 
creeds  rise  and  fall,  but  the  moral  law  is  written  on  the  tablets 
of  eternity.  For  every  false  word  or  unrighteous  deed,  for 
cruelty  and  oppression,  for  lust  or  vanity,  the  price  has  to  be 
paid  at  last:  not  always  by  the  chief  offenders,  but  paid  by 
someone.  Justice  and  truth  alone  endure  and  live.  Injustice 
and  falsehood  may  be  long-lived,  but  doomsday  comes  at  last 
to  them ,  in  French  revolutions  and  other  terrible  ways.” 


Froude. 


WITH  PORTRAITS 


G.  P.  PUTNAM’S  SONS 
NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 
tlbe  IRmcljerbocKei-  lPress 


1923 


Copyright,  1923 
by 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Son* 


Made  in  the  United  States  of  America 


INTRODUCTION 


This  book  represents  a  modest  effort  to  assist 
average  persons  in  the  English-speaking  world  to  under¬ 
stand  the  roots  of  their  thinking. 

Our  civilisation  has  arrived  at  its  present  state  in 
evolution  after  a  long,  painful,  and  most  hazardous 
mental  journey.  All  its  achievements,  and  all  its  hopes 
of  greater  things,  are  now,  in  a  critical  hour,  for  better 
or  for  worse,  largely  in  the  hands  of  men  and  women 
who  have  little  notion  of  that  far  and  perilous  journey, 
and  perhaps  no  clear  idea  at  all  of  their  commanding 
responsibility  towards  the  future  of  mankind. 

Therefore  I  presume  to  hope  that  a  book  which  relates 
in  quite  simple  and  almost  narrative  form  at  least  some 
part  of  the  pilgrimage  of  the  human  mind,  and  which 
conducts  its  reader  to  at  least  some  of  the  chief  battle¬ 
fields  of  controversy  out  of  which  the  thoughts  of  man 
have  emerged  to  their  present  fashion  of  looking  at  life 
and  the  universe,  may  be  of  service  in  helping  to  guard 
from  the  blunders  of  ignorance  and  the  follies  of  im¬ 
patience  both  what  is  precious  in  civilisation  and  what  is 
vital  to  further  advance. 


VI 


INTRODUCTION 


Although  the  book  is  intended  only  for  the  plain  man 
whose  education  has  not  helped  him  to  trace  the  genealogy 
of  the  human  mind  or  the  pedigree  of  his  own  opinions,  I 
think  I  do  not  make  too  bold  a  claim  when  I  utter  the  hope 
that  no  competent  authority  in  scholarship  will  seriously 
dispute  those  main  opinions  which  my  narrative  has  here 
and  there  forced  me  to  express  rather  dogmatically. 

But,  in  any  case,  let  me  disclaim  any  intention  to  teach 
the  least  instructed  of  my  readers  what  he  should  think. 
My  sole  object  is  to  suggest  to  him,  first,  that  all  history 
is  “mental  travel”;  second,  that  evolution  is  a  term  signi¬ 
fying  the  work  of  mind  on  matter;  and  third,  that  if  all 
our  rights  and  privileges  have  been  purchased  for  us  by 
the  past,  some  at  least  of  our  obligations  and  duties 
belong  to  the  future. 

By  furnishing  our  minds  with  knowledge  of  the 
pilgrimage  of  thought  we  can  avoid  the  spirit 

Which  visits  ancient  sins  on  modern  times 
And  punishes  the  Pope  for  Caesar’s  crimes; 

and,  by  the  same  means,  come  to  feel  in  the  lives  of  those 
heroic  souls  who  carried  the  fortunes  of  civilisation 
through  darkness,  through  tempest,  and  through  the 
languors  of  noon,  in  ages  long  past,  a  cause  both  for 
admiration  and  gratitude,  a  call  both  to  constant  faith 
and  unsparing  effort. 

None  of  us  is  so  wise  that  he  does  not  need  constantly 


INTRODUCTION 


Vll 


to  remind  himself  of  the  saying  of  a  great  Englishman: 
“The  mind  is  the  man.  If  that  be  kept  pure,  a  man  signi¬ 
fies  somewhat;  if  not,  I  would  very  fain  see  what  differ¬ 
ence  there  is  betwixt  him  and  a  beast.  He  hath  only 
some  activity  to  do  some  more  mischief.” 


' 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

I. — The  Age  of  Socrates  (470-399  b.c.) 

II. — The  Age  of  Aristotle  (384-322  b.c.)  . 

III.  — The  Age  of  Jesus  ( Circa  b.c.  3~a.d.  33) 

IV.  — The  Age  of  Augustine  (354-430) 

V.— The  Age  of  Erasmus  (1467-1536) 

VI. — The  Age  of  Cromwell  (1599-1658) 
VII. — The  Age  of  Wesley  (1703-1791) 
Conclusion 


PAGB 

I 

.  29 

•  53 

„  81 

.  109 

.  141 

*  177 
.  209 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 

PAGE 

Socrates  ...  .....  4 

From  a  bust  in  the  Villa  Albani. 

(Baumeister') . 

Aristotle . 32 

Rome,  National  Museum. 

Photo  Alinari. 

Jesus  Christ . 56 

From  an  old  copper  print. 

St.  Augustine . 84 

From  the  painting  by  Pietro  Gandido. 

Erasmus . 112 

From  the  portrait  by  Holbein. 

Original  in  the  Louvre. 

Oliver  Cromwell . 144 

From  a  painting,  by  an  unknown  artist,  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery. 

John  Wesley . 180 

Done  from  a  miniature  of  the  same  size. 

Painted  by  I.  Barry. 


xi 


SEVEN  AGES 

CHAPTER  I 

THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 
(470-399  B.C.) 


Z 


SEVEN  AGES 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 
(470-399  b.c.) 

At  the  dawn  of  modern  history  stands  the  figure  of  an 
old  stone-cutter :  attractive  and  quaint,  likeable  and 
eccentric,  but  wholly  unimpressive;  the  last  man  in  the 
world  a  sculptor  would  take  for  any  aspect  of  human 
glory. 

No  picturesque  dust  of  the  wilderness  stains  his  shabby 
garment;  no  prophetic  fire  burns  in  his  rather  ludicrous 
eyes.  On  the  contrary,  he  is  a  playful,  a  whimsical,  a 
waggish,  an  ironical  person;  in  form,  comic  and  clown¬ 
ish,  so  that  he  is  likened  by  one  of  his  friends  to  a  cottage 
loaf;  in  nature,  nearer  akin  to  Bunyan,  Samuel  Johnson, 
Sir  Thomas  Browne,  or  even  Charles  Lamb,  than  to 
John  the  Baptist,  Mohammed,  Luther,  Robespierre,  or  any 
other  firebrand  of  history. 

Such  was  Socrates,  the  originating  genius  of  common 
sense,  the  great  teacher  of  moral  and  intellectual  veracity, 

3 


4 


SEVEN  AGES 


one  of  the  profoundest  influences  in  our  Anglo-Saxon 
civilisation. 

It  is  worthy  of  reflection  that  this  man,  who  opened 
the  windows  of  the  human  mind  on  a  new  heaven  and 
a  new  earth,  proclaimed  no  fiery  propaganda,  drew  no 
crusading  sword,  ordained  no  priesthood,  laid  no  im¬ 
patient  hand  upon  the  altars  of  tradition,  nor,  in  his 
commerce  with  the  foolishness  and  perversity  of  man¬ 
kind,  ever  raised  his  voice  above  the  genial  tones  of 
courtesy. 

Yet  to  him  had  come  one  of  those  strange  spiritual 
experiences  which  change  the  direction  of  a  man’s  soul, 
and  stamp  his  human  nature  with  the  ineffaceable  mark 
of  divinity. 

Like  every  Greek  citizen,  Socrates  had  served  as  a 
soldier,  had  marched  cheerfully  and  fought  heroically 
accoutred  in  helmet,  cuirass,  and  greaves,  armed  with 
sword,  battle-axe,  javelin,  and  shield — a  man  of  con¬ 
spicuous  strength.  One  day  this  soldier  of  notable 
physical  powers  found  his  feet  rooted  to  the  ground  in 
the  camp  of  the  Greek  army.  Thus  pinned  to  the  earth 
he  remained  for  twenty-four  hours  in  a  trance,  the  body 
suddenly  reduced  to  impotence,  the  spirit  caught  up  into 
regions  whither  no  eye  could  follow  it.  From  this  long 
swoon  of  the  senses,  the  soul  of  Socrates  emerged  with 
a  knowledge  which  transformed  his  life  and  afterwards 
transformed  the  life  of  the  human  race. 


SOCRATES 


From  a  bust  in  the  Villa  Albani 
( Baumeister ) 


► 


J 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


5 


The  knowledge  which  came  to  him  during  this  day 
of  trance,  revolutionary  knowledge  of  the  highest  im¬ 
port  to  humanity,  was  not,  however,  to  be  shouted  from 
the  house-tops  nor  to  be  made  the  battle-cry  of  a  new 
religion.  It  was  to  be  passed  with  smile  and  jest,  with 
banter  and  with  playful  irony,  into  the  mind  of  any  con¬ 
versational  man  who  chanced  to  cross  his  road.  Thus 
did  Socrates  construe  his  celestial  commission.  He  was 
to  give  his  whole  life  to  its  teaching,  he  was  to  be  ruled 
by  it  in  all  his  habits  and  in  all  his  words :  but  he  was  not 
to  get  hot  about  it,  certainly  he  was  not  to  bring  into  the 
world  a  new  school  of  fanatics. 

Consider,  before  we  pass  to  the  message  itself,  this 
conversion  of  Socrates :  the  strangest  in  history,  perhaps 
the  most  significant 

Men  like  Luther  may  dismember  an  incoherent  church, 
or  like  Robespierre  overturn  an  unbalanced  throne,  or 
like  Napoleon  establish  empires  as  glittering  and  short¬ 
lived  as  the  ephemera  which  swarm  above  the  swamps 
of  stagnation :  such  events  in  the  long  pilgrimage  of  man¬ 
kind  are  in  truth  of  little  more  meaning  to  evolution  than 
those  “personal  incidents”  in  the  parliaments  of  nations 
which  catch  the  excited  attention  of  the  newspaper  re¬ 
porter,  but  bear  no  relation  to  the  debate  and  possess  no 
significance  for  the  ultimate  historian. 

Evolution,  let  us  learn  as  the  alphabet  of  all  our  future 
thinking,  is  a  movement  in  thought,  not  the  swing  of  an 


6 


SEVEN  AGES 


axe.  It  is  leaven,  not  dynamite.  The  true  servants  of 
this  mysterious  movement  in  mind  are  never  to  be  sought 
among  conspirators  and  assassins :  they  are  the  inspired 
talkers  who  sit  peacefully  at  meat  with  their  fellow-men. 

In  a  man  such  as  Socrates,  a  man  of  unruffled  gentle¬ 
ness  and  an  infinite  patience,  an  inspired  man  moved  by 
knowledge  too  high  for  conflict,  too  deep  for  sect  or 
party,  we  discern  the  authentic  apostle  of  evolution,  the 
true  and  faithful  pilot  who  quietly  bears  the  children  of 
men  from  one  shore  of  existence  to  another,  from  illusion 
to  reality,  from  the  temporal  to  the  eternal;  for  such  a 
man  penetrates  to  the  hidden  springs  of  human  nature 
and  in  the  secret  places  of  personality  makes  those 
changes  of  the  mind  which  alter,  not  so  much  the  always 
transitory  conditions  of  life,  but  life  itself. 

Fretful  and  impatient  men,  swept  off  their  feet  by 
indignation  or  enthusiasm,  destroy  more  than  they  build, 
and  what  they  build  with  the  trembling  hands  of  excited 
haste  is  soon  destroyed  by  their  lineal  descendants  of 
physical  reform.  But  the  man  who  has  undergone  a 
veritable  conversion,  who  has  been  in  true  communion 
with  the  unseen,  comes  quietly  back  to  earth  with  the 
knowledge  that  the  soul  alone  is  the  real,  and  that  life 
has  eternity  in  which  to  complete  its  perfection.  He  over¬ 
turns  nothing — not  even  a  footstool.  His  work  lies  in  a 
region  far  removed  from  the  Wardour  Streets  and 
Tottenham  Court  Roads  of  history.  He  penetrates  to  the 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


7 


holy  of  holies.  And  there  he  neither  uses  the  sacrificial 
knife  nor  mumbles  the  incantations  of  mystery.  What 
he  does  is  to  fertilise  the  mind  of  humanity  with  an  idea. 
And  that  idea  may  be  traced  descending  with  power  and 
increase  down  all  the  ages  of  mankind. 

From  his  trance  Socrates  emerged  with  an  overwhelm¬ 
ing  sense  of  an  absolute  goodness  transcending  human 
morality,  an  absolute  beauty  transcending  earth’s  im¬ 
perfect  loveliness,  an  absolute  truth  transcending  the 
reach  of  man’s  bounded  reason.  Human  life  became  for 
him  no  longer  a  thing  apart  from  this  universal  existence 
of  the  divine,  no  longer  its  illegitimate  or  guilty  off¬ 
spring.  On  the  contrary,  the  whole  business  of  man’s  life 
was  to  dwell  with  the  thought  of  this  transcending  per¬ 
fection,  to  live  with  the  consciousness  of  this  divine 
reality  in  his  mind.  The  supreme  concern  of  the  wise 
man  was  to  care  for  his  soul. 

The  word  “soul”  did  not  mean  to  Socrates  a  shadowy 
ghost  or  a  breath  that  came  from  and  returned  to  the 
circumambient  air;  it  meant,  quite  simply,  the  conscious 
self  of  a  man,  his  most  pressing  sense  of  vitality,  his  most 
natural  sense  of  reality.  In  the  teaching  of  Socrates,  we 
may  say,  man  became  to  himself ,  for  the  first  time  since 
the  creation  of  the  world,  a  living  soul.  Those  who 
listened  to  him  did  not  speculate  whether  they  possessed 
souls :  they  thought  of  themselves  as  souls.  This  was  the 
supreme  achievement  of  Socrates.  Fie  naturalised  the 


8 


SEVEN  AGES 


supernatural.  He  was  a  realist  in  the  region  of  idealism. 
He  unified  the  universe. 

His  faith  in  the  soul,  as  Pater  says,  was  a  matter  of 
invincible  natural  prepossession,  an  immovable  personal 
conviction;  it  came  to  him,  in  his  own  characteristic 
words,  “apart  from  demonstration,  with  a  sort  of  natural 
likelihood  and  fitness.”  The  universe  was  created  by  a 
divine  power:  in  that  universe,  paramount  in  this  par¬ 
ticular  part  of  it,  was  man’s  soul.  Therefore,  as  Plato 
bears  witness,  Socrates  taught  his  fellow-citizens  the 
supreme  duty  of  caring  for  their  souls.  This  is  to  say, 
he  established  an  authority  in  human  life,  rescuing  it 
from  moral  chaos  and  giving  it  both  a  route  and  a 
destination. 

When  we  come  to  learn  what  Socrates  meant  by  caring 
for  the  soul,  we  see  the  greatness  of  the  revolution  which 
he  wrought  in  the  history  of  the  human  race. 

He  made  his  appeal,  not  to  revelation,  but  to  common 
sense.  He  neither  threatened  nor  rhapsodised.  The  chief 
words  of  his  discourse  were  truthfulness,  justice,  forti¬ 
tude,  temperance,  self-command,  beneficence,  beauty;  but 
never  does  he  employ  these  noble  words  to  adorn  a  pero¬ 
ration  or  to  wheel  like  cavalry  in  rounding  off  a  sonorous 
period.  Rather  do  they  dart  from  his  mind  on  the  spear¬ 
head  of  a  sudden  home-thrust,  or  glide  almost  imper¬ 
ceptibly  into  his  bantering  table-talk,  there  to  mingle  their 
solemn  colours  with  the  lighter  tones  of  a  jest. 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


9 


His  great  work  was  to  make  men  honest.  In  his  divine 
passion  for  reality  he  saw  that  illusion  had  its  chief 
strength  in  deception.  How  easily  are  men  deceived !  It 
is  a  world  of  dupes  and  blunderers,  the  victims  of  decep¬ 
tion — deception  of  the  soul  by  the  senses,  deception  of 
character  by  fashion  and  pretension.  Therefore  he  laid 
all  the  emphasis  of  his  teaching  on  veracity. 

Honesty  at  the  first  glance  is  one  of  the  humdrum 
virtues.  It  seems  to  scale  no  height,  to  gain  no  glory. 
It  looks  like  a  word  for  the  copy-book  rather  than  the 
pulpit;  a  theme  for  the  elementary  moralist,  not  the 
orator.  But  in  the  mouth  of  Socrates  it  became  a  word 
of  commanding  significance,  proving  itself  more  power¬ 
ful  than  the  sword  of  Alexander,  more  creative  than  all 
the  edicts  of  Caesar.  And,  if  we  think  about  it,  even  to 
this  day  is  it  not  one  of  the  greatest  words  of  the  human 
spirit — so  great  because  the  thing  it  denotes  is  so  rare? 
An  honest  workman,  an  honest  merchant,  an  honest 
lawyer,  an  honest  doctor,  an  honest  theologian,  an  hon¬ 
est  statesman:  when  we  encounter  such  a  person  do  we 
not  feel  that  he  stands  out  from  the  ruck  of  his  fellows 
with  an  eminent,  an  uplifting  attraction?  To  find  a  man 
we  can  trust,  a  man  who  rings  true,  a  man  in  whom  there 
is  no  shadow  of  the  false,  is  not  this  an  experience  that 
kindles  the  fire  of  a  creative  admiration? 

Socrates  believed  that  this  was  what  God  chiefly  re¬ 
quires  of  a  man — to  be  honest.  Therefore  he  set  himself 
to  show  men  the  attraction  and  reasonableness  of  honesty. 


10 


SEVEN  AGES 


To  this  end  he  taught  them  the  art  of  an  inward  dialogue. 

He  was  the  first  of  men  to  formulate  a  logic  of  the 
conscience,  to  identify  the  conscience  with  the  soul.  He 
taught  a  dialectic  of  the  personality.  By  means  of  intro¬ 
spection  men  were  to  become  acquainted  with  the  state  of 
their  souls.  They  were  to  be  merciless  cross-examiners 
of  all  the  ideas,  opinions,  and  acts  which  the  soul  adduced 
as  reasons  for  its  good  opinion  of  itself.  They  were  to 
talk  to  themselves.  They  were  to  make  the  language  of 
their  thoughts,  not  a  monologue,  but  a  duologue. 

Further,  they  were  to  subject  the  eloquence  of  poets 
and  teachers  to  a  like  cross-examination.  They  were  to 
be  very  careful  about  the  deceiving  power  of  words. 
They  were  to  challenge  even  ordinary  words  for  their 
definition.  This  was  more  important  than  guarding  the 
soul  from  deception  by  the  senses.  For,  whereas  any 
man  might  see  that  it  was  unreasonable  for  an  immortal 
soul  to  live  as  a  perishable  body,  few  were  able  to  dis¬ 
cern  the  deception  which  too  often  lies  in  an  impressive 
word  even  in  a  word  which  seems  to  commend  the  highest 
virtue. 

All  this  was  new  to  the  world.  The  term  “soul”  had 
hitherto  belonged  to  mystifying  superstition  or  to  unin¬ 
telligent  sophistry.  The  idea  of  introspection  as  a  re¬ 
ligious  duty,  the  idea  that  a  man  might  do  more  for 
himself  in  cross-examining  his  conscience  than  the  priest 
could  do  for  him  by  sacrificing  terror-stricken  animals 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


ii 


or  by  enjoining  purifications,  this  was  a  revolution  in 
the  mind  of  the  human  race. 

Moreover,  the  manner  in  which  the  revolution  was 
accomplished  was  itself  a  revolution.  Socrates  appealed 
to  no  God  and  to  the  authority  of  no  philosopher.  He 
appealed  to  the  common  sense  of  mankind,  making  that 
good  sense  the  seat  of  the  divine,  the  tribunal  of  the 
eternal.  In  appealing  to  this  universal  common  sense,  let 
us  remember  too  that  he  made  no  call  to  the  wilderness 
and  uttered  no  command  to  preach.  A  man  was  not  to 
set  about  reforming  the  world  because  he  had  discovered 
his  own  mind.  He  was  not  to  forsake  his  work  and  take 
to  converting  his  fellow-men  because  he  had  discovered 
himself  to  be  a  soul.  If  he  was  a  good  maker  of  pots, 
he  was  to  continue  making  pots.  The  one  difference  con¬ 
version  should  make  to  him  was  in  his  attitude  to  life. 
He  was  to  live  in  the  companionship  of  eternal  and  im¬ 
mutable  ideas,  unmoved  by  the  accidents  of  fortune,  un¬ 
tempted  by  the  seductions  of  the  world,  an  honest  man 
doing  his  duty  without  fear  and  without  pride,  his  inward 
life  known  to  him  with  as  unsparing  a  truthfulness  as 
it  was  known  to  God. 

Now  Socrates  not  only  contributed  this  new  idea  to 
the  world;  he  contributed  as  well  a  personality  which 
commended  itself  to  the  affection  and  the  reason  of  the 
best  kind  of  men.  He  was  entirely  consistent.  There  he 
stood,  in  his  shabby  garment,  no  sandals  on  his  feet,  no 
money  in  his  hand,  his  whole  life  open  to  his  fellow- 


12 


SEVEN  AGES 


citizens,  teaching  the  same  veracity  of  soul  which  so 
palpably  distinguished  his  daily  life,  practising  in  every 
detail  of  his  Athenian  existence  the  identical  righteous¬ 
ness  which  he  preached  in  discourse. 

Further,  his  preaching,  if  preaching  it  could  be  called, 
was  not  like  the  preaching  of  his  predecessor  Pytha¬ 
goras,  who  invented  the  word  “philosophy,”  and  founded 
a  religion,  and  laid  difficult  commandments  upon  his 
disciples.  To  listen  to  Socrates  was  as  good  as  going  to 
the  play.  There  was  wit  in  almost  every  line  of  his  con¬ 
versation.  He  unmasked  impostors  with  a  smooth  gentle¬ 
ness  which  was  extremely  humorous.  He  created  a  new 
art :  the  art  of  turning  the  soul  inside  out.  The  search 
for  an  honest  man  became  almost  a  sport.  In  his  oblique 
and  humorous  fashion  he  revealed  to  men  the  sublime 
beauty  of  goodness  by  disentangling  the  pretensions  of 
the  charlatans  from  their  badness,  and  making  that  bad¬ 
ness  ridiculous.  And  all  this  went  with  a  treatment  of 
divine  things  which  was  singularly  fresh  and  penetrat- 
ingly  real.  He  could  talk  of  God  without  shuddering, 
and  of  the  soul  without  unction.  In  his  eyes,  which  were 
for  ever  seeking  and  searching  the  eyes  of  other  men,  was 
the  twinkling  smile  of  a  question  difficult  to  answer,  and 
beneath  that  quizzical  smile  the  profound  depths  of  an 
unfathomable  serenity. 

Men  were  drawn  not  only  to  his  teaching,  but  to 
the  man  himself.  In  Socrates  they  felt  the  irresistible 
attraction  of  one  who  was  supremely  good  and  su- 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


13 


premely  human.  They  loved  him  and  tried  to  be  like 
him. 

The  time  in  which  he  came  called  for  a  steadying  in¬ 
fluence.  Some  two  hundred  years  before  his  day  Greek 
genius  had  begun  to  break  with  the  paralysing  tyranny 
of  tradition.  A  few  remarkable  men  in  the  cities  of 
Ionia  had  come  to  regard  nature  as  a  document  which 
promised  greater  enlightenment  to  human  kind  than  all 
the  superstitions  of  mythology.  The  gods  and  goddesses 
of  legend  were  seen  to  be  immortal  and  contemptible: 
were  felt  to  be  unworthy  of  man’s  attention.  They  ex¬ 
plained  nothing.  Nature,  on  the  other  hand,  was  full  of 
manifest  greatness  and  mystery,  and  was  controlled  by 
law,  ruled  by  intelligence.  To  understand  nature  would 
be  to  discover  the  origin  and  purposes  of  creation. 

A  new  thing  came  slowly  to  birth:  philosophy.  The 
idea  meant  sight-seeing,  looking  about,  observation,  con¬ 
templation  of  visible  things,  reflection  on  their  origins. 
It  was  science.  Those  who  followed  philosophy  were 
searchers  after  knowledge,  devoted  to  truth  for  its  own 
sake.  They  had  discovered  a  new  interest  for  the  human 
mind :  a  study  of  the  physical  universe.  Their  faith  was 
strong  that  the  majesty  and  mystery  of  this  great  physical 
universe  might  be  traced  back  by  the  mind  of  man  to  its 
intelligent  beginning. 

We  see  the  spirit  of  these  men,  the  first  founders  of 
European  civilisation,  in  the  reply  made  by  Pythagoras 


14 


SEVEN  AGES 


to  one  who  asked  him  the  meaning  of  the  new  word 
philosopher : 

“The  life  of  man  (he  said)  seemed  to  him  to  resemble 
that  Fair,  which  was  kept  by  all  Greece  with  the  cele¬ 
bration  of  games.  For  as  there,  some  sought  for  glory 
by  the  exercise  of  the  body,  and  nobility  by  obtaining  a 
crown ;  and  others  aimed  at  profit  and  gain  in  buying  and 
selling;  but  a  third  sort,  who  were  people  of  the  best 
fashion,  neither  wanted  applause  nor  gain,  but  came  only 
to  see  and  consider  what  was  a-doing,  and  in  what  man¬ 
ner  :  so  likewise  we  are  come  from  another  life  and 
nature  into  this  life,  as  from  some  city,  to  the  celebration 
of  a  Fair;  and  some  hunt  after  glory,  and  others  money; 
and  some  few,  despising  everything  else,  diligently  study 
nature :  these  are  called  lovers  of  wisdom,  that  is  Philoso¬ 
phers  :  and  as  in  the  other  case,  it  is  more  noble  to  look 
on,  than  to  acquire  anything,  so  in  life,  the  knowledge 
and  contemplation  of  nature  is  preferable  to  all  other 
studies.” 


Anaxagoras,  asked  why  he  was  born,  made  answer, 
“To  contemplate  the  works  of  nature”;  Heracleitus, 
asked  how  he  obtained  his  knowledge,  replied,  “I  searched 
myself”;  while  Plato,  later  on,  in  words  which  will  never 
die,  defined  the  philosopher  as  “the  spectator  of  all  time 
and  all  existence.”  From  the  first  beginnings  of  Greek 
speculation,  there  is  this  admirable  dignity  of  the  mind, 
an  inward  and  spiritual  freedom  as  different  from  politi¬ 
cal  liberty  as  grace  is  different  from  deportment — an  en- 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


15 


franchisement  of  the  soul,  setting  it  free  from  all  the 
assaults  of  time  and  circumstance.  The  Greeks  desired 
to  understand  the  universe  in  which  man  found  himself 
with  an  inquisitive  mind  and  a  soul  capable  of  compre¬ 
hension.  They  set  out  to  satisfy  this  desire  with  temper¬ 
ance,  reverence,  and  a  courage  which  was  without 
effrontery.  They  called  this  sightseeing  journey  of  the 
soul  by  the  name  of  philosophy. 

But  the  first  founders  of  our  civilisation,  those  won¬ 
derful  Ionians  whose  philosophy  was  as  well  a  search 
after  goodness  as  a  search  after  truth,  were  followed  by 
professional  casuists  who  lived  so  entirely  under  the 
spell  of  words  that  a  dexterous  use  of  mere  terms  became 
almost  the  object  of  existence.  They  ceased  to  be  seekers 
after  truth.  They  appeared  before  the  people  as  jugglers 
of  words,  acrobats  and  contortionists  of  logic,  taking 
money  for  their  performances,  confusing  the  mind  of 
Athens  with  scepticisms  and  atheisms  which  rotted  even 
the  most  ancient  roots  of  conduct. 

It  was  in  an  hour  of  human  history  as  perilous  as  this 
that  Socrates  appeared  among  men  with  his  message 
from  God.  He  had  as  his  companion  a  spirit,  or  a  voice, 
which  constantly  instructed  him.  One  of  his  English 
critics  has  said  hastily  that  this  dsemonium  of  Socrates 
is  a  case  for  the  pathologist — without  pausing  to  ask  him¬ 
self  whether  any  pathologist  in  Europe  could  survive  a 
cross-examination  at  the  hands  of  Socrates.  As  well 


i6 


SEVEN  AGES 


might  he  refer  the  genius  of  Shakespeare  to  a  phrenolo¬ 
gist  or  the  broadcasting  sympathy  of  Wesley’s  soul  to  a 
man  like  Dr.  Freud— of  one  idea  and  that  a  nasty  one. 

But  thus  in  all  ages  of  pause  and  poverty  does  well- 
intentioned  mediocrity,  mounting  the  step-ladder  of 
presumption,  attempt  to  take  with  tape  or  foot-rule  the 
measure  of  Alp  and  Himalaya. 

To  Socrates,  who  was  the  great  enemy  of  all  such 
quackery,  his  conversion  was  real,  the  restraining  voice 
of  his  dsemonium  was  real :  and  we  must  be  blind  indeed 
if  we  do  not  see  that  it  was  only  because  of  this  un¬ 
mistakable  spiritual  experience  that  he  became,  what  this 
very  critic  acknowledges  he  did  become,  the  chief  origi¬ 
nator  of  “a  vast  intellectual  revolution.”  The  man  was 
inspired. 

When  he  began  to  teach,  the  priest  was  in  power  but 
on  the  defensive:  a  situation  of  deadly  menace  both  to 
freedom  and  to  truth.  Religion  was  supported  by  the 
superstitious  peasant,  afraid  for  his  crops  and  his  cattle 
more  than  for  his  own  soul,  and  by  such  vested  interests 
of  the  temple  as  were  represented  by  the  men  who  con¬ 
tracted  to  supply  sacrificial  animals  for  the  altar — 

.  .  .  that  heifer  lowing  at  the  skies, 

And  all  her  silken  flanks  with  garlands  drest. 

But  the  more  thoughtful  and  disinterested  citizens  were 
listening  with  eagerness  or  curiosity  to  almost  every  con¬ 
ceivable  theory  of  materialistic  philosophy.  Scepticism 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


1 7 


was  in  the  air.  Not  only  were  the  old  gods  passing  under 
a  cloud :  the  heavens  were  emptying  themselves  of  any 
object  for  the  adoration  of  man. 

To  understand  the  work  of  Socrates  we  must  remind 
ourselves  that  the  Greeks,  who  had  invented  arithmetic, 
mathematics,  and  philosophy,  were  the  founders  of  physi¬ 
cal  science,  and  that  centuries  before  the  birth  of  Jesus 
they  had  their  theories  that  the  earth  was  a  sphere  float¬ 
ing  in  space,  that  the  moon  shone  by  reflected  light,  that 
matter  was  composed  of  atoms,  that  all  things  were  ulti¬ 
mately  of  the  same  basis,  that  man  had  an  animal  for  his 
ancestor,  and  that  he  and  all  other  living  things  had 
come  to  be  what  they  were  by  the  pressure  of  circum¬ 
stance  and  the  influence  of  heredity.  Furthermore,  to 
show  how  wide  they  spread  the  net  of  their  speculations, 
these  ancient  Greeks  had  in  Gorgias  a  philosopher  of 
nihilism,  and  in  the  brilliant  Heracleitus  a  Nietzsche  who 
hated  democracy,  lauded  war  as  the  father  of  all  virtue, 
and  bitterly  denounced  Homer  as  a  blasphemer  against 
the  universe  because  he  had  prayed  for  its  abolition. 

It  was,  then,  in  an  age  of  ferment  and  disintegration, 
of  new  credulities  and  perilous  freedoms,  that  Socrates 
came  with  his  dsemonium,  the  voice  from  heaven.  The 
violet-crowned  city  of  Athens  in  whose  narrow,  mephitic, 
unlighted,  and  rough-paved  streets  he  walked  with  his 
companions,  or  under  whose  mouldering  porticoes  he 
taught  his  disciples,  or  in  whose  shops  he  watched  and 


i8 


SEVEN  AGES 


questioned  the  artificers  at  their  work,  was  a  place  not 
only  of  intellectual  excitement  but  of  almost  inconceivable 
discomfort  and  of  abhorrent  moral  evil. 

Slavery  was  accepted  by  all  men  as  an  ordinance  of 
heaven.  Virtuous  women  were  not  expected  to  be  intel¬ 
ligent  and  were  denied  all  the  arenas  of  discussion.  Only 
the  courtesan  was  treated  as  an  intellectual  person :  in  her, 
wit  was  regarded  as  a  natural  ornament.  Because  the 
virtuous  women  were  degraded  to  the  position  of  house- 
slaves  and  excluded  from  the  higher  functions  of  family 
life,  perversions  of  nature  were  deep-rooted.  Cruelty 
flourished  and  was  unquestioned.  Superstition  held  not 
only  religion  in  its  clutches,  but  medicine  as  well.  Suf¬ 
fering  was  wide-spread  and  almost  disregarded.  Plague 
crept  with  foreign  immigrants  into  the  pestiferous  streets 
of  these  ancient  cities,  and  slew  thousands  of  the  Greeks, 
finally  allying  itself  with  war  to  overthrow  the  physical 
basis  of  Athenian  civilisation. 

In  thinking  of  the  Greece  of  those  days,  says  a  com¬ 
petent  authority,  we  must  not  only  “think  away 
railways  and  telegraphs  and  gasworks  and  tea  and 
advertisements  and  bananas,”  but  many  other  things  in 
the  catalogue  of  comfort.  We  must  imagine  houses  with¬ 
out  drains,  beds  without  sheets  or  springs,  rooms  as  cold, 
or  as  hot,  as  the  open  air,  only  draughtier,  meals  that 
began  and  ended  with  pudding,  and  cities  that  could  boast 
neither  gentry  nor  millionaires.  We  must  learn  to  tell 
the  time  without  watches,  to  cross  rivers  without  bridges, 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


i9 


and  seas  without  a  compass,  to  fasten  our  clothes  (or 
rather  our  two  pieces  of  cloth)  with  two  pins  instead  of 
rows  of  buttons,  to  wear  our  shoes  or  sandals  without 
stockings,  to  warm  ourselves  over  a  pot  of  ashes,  to 
judge  open-air  plays  or  lawsuits  on  a  cold  winter’s  morn¬ 
ing,  to  study  poetry  without  books,  geography  without 
maps,  and  politics  without  newspapers.1 

An  open  drain  ran  through  the  streets  of  Athens.  Her 
buildings  were  dictated  by  the  militarist  or  the  priest: 
they  were  not  the  creation  of  the  aesthetic  sense.  All  was 
haphazard  and  laissez-faire :  nothing  was  well  ordered 
that  touched  the  common  life  of  man.  Even  education 
was  neglected,  and  the  national  schoolmaster  unknown. 

Moreover,  we  must  bear  in  mind  that  Greece  was  not 
a  country  divided  only  between  the  superstitious  and  the 
enlightened.  As  with  us,  so1  with  them  in  days  long 
before  Socrates,  the  mass  of  men  cared  for  none  of  these 
things.  Xenophanes  of  Colophon  in  the  sixth  century 
before  Christ  complains  that  men  think  more  of  muscle 
than  of  mind,  that  the  multitude  run  after  wrestlers  and 
boxers,  athletes  and  drivers  of  racing  chariots,  and  leave 
the  philosopher,  who  could  tell  them  that  there  is  only 
one  God,  and  who  could  prove  to  them  that  the  gods  of 
Homer  and  Hesiod  are  contemptible  fictions,  to  starve  at 
the  street  corner.  This  testimony  is  of  value,  seeing  that 
it  helps  us  to  realise  one  of  the  chief  truths  of  history,  to 

1  The  Greek  Commonwealth,  Alfred  Zimmern,  p.  213. 


20 


SEVEN  AGES 


wit,  that  progress  proceeds  from  the  few,  and  that  the 
apathy  and  indifference  of  the  multitude  furnish  the  rea¬ 
son  for  the  slowness  of  all  improvement. 

One  thing  more  we  must  remember :  during  a  great 
part  of  Socrates’  life,  war  was  distracting  the  world  of 
Greece.  Athens,  the  centre  of  political  life,  was  for  years 
a  besieged  city,  and  only  on  the  sea  could  the  citizen  move 
with  some  sense  of  freedom. 

Now,  in  this  excited  and  uncomfortable  world  So¬ 
crates,  with  his  cool  head,  his  observant  eye,  and  his 
divine  certitude,  stood  midway  between  old  craven  super¬ 
stition  and  all  disfiguring  materialism.  He  believed  in 
a  supreme  Excellence,  but  not  in  the  legends  of  the  priest. 
He  believed  in  the  existence  of  the  material  world,  but  not 
in  its  power  to  satisfy  the  soul  of  man.  Thus  fortified  by 
faith,  his  affections  were  quietly  set  on  moral  and  spiritual 
perfection.  He  sought  the  good  life,  the  life  of  temper¬ 
ance  and  aspiration.  He  conformed  to  nearly  all  the 
traditions  of  his  time,  but  followed  in  his  spirit  the  path 
of  a  new  righteousness.  He  censured  only  the  absurdities 
of  those  philosophers  who  would  argue  away  the  idea  of 
a  universal  intelligence,  reducing  nature  to  a  chaos  and 
the  mind  of  man  to  an  accident. 

This  new  philosophy,  we  should  observe,  was  founded 
upon  physical  science,  a  science  which  had  its  gaze  di¬ 
rected  solely  to  the  mysterious  past  of  creation.  It  was 
unconcerned  with  the  future  of  mankind.  It  believed 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


21 


that  an  explanation  could  be  found  for  all  this  universal 
frame  of  things — the  starry  heavens,  the  round  world, 
and  the  laws  of  nature.  In  a  word,  it  was  concerned 
only  with  causation,  as  Greek  literature  and  Greek  art 
were  concerned  only  with  antiquity.  We  might  almost 
say  that  every  Greek  of  that  time  walked  forward  with 
his  head  turned  over  his  shoulder. 

Socrates  ridiculed  the  vanity  of  these  new  philosophers. 
He  broke  down  their  fine-spun  theories  with  the  solid 
words  of  common  sense.  There  was  order  in  the  world. 
There  was  a  manifest  design  in  nature.  The  soul  of  man 
knew  by  instinct  the  difference  between  right  and  wrong. 

This  contention  was  not  between  belief  and  unbelief. 
Unbelief  is  the  only  religion  which  has  never  existed. 
“Not  to  believe,”  says  Bacon,  “is  to  believe.”  It  was  a 
contention  between  belief  in  purpose  and  belief  in  no 
purpose.  Socrates  argued  that  the  universe  declared  the 
power  and  the  intelligence  of  a  supreme  being.  His 
opponents  argued  that  things  had  come  to  be  what  they 
were  either  by  an  accident  of  nature  or  at  the  whim  of 
powers  who  were  careless  of  mankind. 

We  may  most  conveniently  summarise  his  attitude  by 
considering  the  criticism  which  has  been  brought  against 
him  by  scholars  of  our  own  time.  As  late  as  1914,  one 
of  these  critics  wrote  in  his  haste : 

“When  Socrates  argued  that,  because  the  human  body 
is  animated  by  a  consciousness,  the  material  universe 


22 


SEVEN  AGES 


must  be  similarly  animated,  Democritus  might  have 
answered  that  the  world  presents  no  appearance  of  being 
organised  like  an  animal.” 

To  which  objection  Socrates,  we  think,  would  have 
replied  :  “But  it  is  organised  ” 

The  same  critic  strongly  opposes  himself  to  the  com¬ 
mon-sense  argument  of  Socrates  that  design  in  nature 
implies  a  creative  intelligence.  We  read: 

“When  he  argued  that  because  statues  and  pictures 
are  known  to  be  the  work  of  intelligence,  the  living 
models  from  which  they  are  copied  must  be  similarly  due 
to  design,  Aristodemus  should  have  answered,  that  the 
former  are  seen  to  be  manufactured,  while  the  latter 
are  seen  to  grow.” 

To  which  argument,  Socrates  would  surely  have  made 
answer:  “Come  now,  Aristodemus,  you  who  know  so 
much  about  these  things,  tell  me  what  is  growth?” 

But  our  critic  is  dead  against  the  idea  that  things  have 
come  to  be  what  they  are  from  any  originating  purpose. 
He  cannot  abide  what  is  called  the  teleological  argument : 

“Teleology  has  been  destroyed  by  the  Darwinian  theory; 
but  before  the  Origin  of  Species  appeared,  the  slightest 
scrutiny  might  have  shown  that  it  was  a  precarious  foun¬ 
dation  for  religious  belief.” 

It  is  a  dangerous  thing,  we  take  leave  to  say,  to  criti¬ 
cise  Socrates,  even  behind  his  back.  During  the  oppres- 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


23 


sive  reign  of  Darwin,  it  is  true  that  the  argument  from 
purpose  dropped  out  of  the  trembling  hand  of  an  intimi¬ 
dated  philosophy.  But  that  tyranny  is  overpast.  Philoso¬ 
phy  has  come  back  to  the  Socratic  wisdom.  We  doubt 
very  much  whether  this  critic  could  survive  ten  minutes’ 
cross-examination  at  the  hands  of  M.  Bergson,  and  we 
feel  comfortably  assured  that  Socrates  himself  would 
have  enjoyed  a  conversation  with  him  as  richly  as  he 
enjoyed  any  of  the  most  playful  colloquies  recorded  in  the 
Dialogues  of  Plato. 

Not  only  is  common  sense  on  the  side  of  Socrates,  but 
the  latest  philosophy,  the  latest  findings  of  physical 
science.  After  all  these  years  of  wandering  in  the  pain¬ 
ful  wilderness  of  fumbling  guesswork  we  are  back  at  the 
intuitive  conviction  of  Leucippus  ( circa  500  b.c.)  that 
nothing  arises  by  chance,  but  all  things  by  reason  and 
necessity.  The  atom,  to  which  Victorian  materialism 
pinned  its  faith  for  confirmation  of  its  mechanistic  dog¬ 
matisms,  has  now  been  broken  down,  revealing  to  the 
disappointed  mind  of  science  a  reeling  world  of  invisible 
electricity — electricity  which  still  eludes  any  definition  at 
the  hands  of  science.  Evolution  is  no  longer  seen  as  the 
antithesis  of  teleology,  rather  as  its  synonym;  no  longer 
as  the  alternative  of  creation,  but  rather  as  its  method. 
Evolution,  we  learn  at  last,  is  a  movement  with  direction 
and  intelligence,  a  movement  from  the  simple  to  the  com¬ 
plex,  a  movement  from  the  crude  to  the  more  perfect — 
a  movement.  Once  there  was  a  chaos,  then  an  amoeba, 


24 


SEVEN  AGES 


then  a  man,  and  then  a  Socrates.  From  the  manifold  and 
manifest  achievements  of  this  mysterious  movement  of 
life,  purpose  is  a  logical  deduction.  If  we  do  not  rely  as 
surely  as  Butler  did  on  the  argument  from  design,  at 
least  we  now  speak  with  some  degree  of  confidence  of 
a  teleology  immanent  in  evolution.  Life  is  seeking  to 
achieve  something. 

Socrates,  then,  proved  his  wisdom  by  resting  so 
serenely  on  the  solid  ground  of  common  sense.  The 
universe  is  organised:  it  is  not  a  chaos.  Life  moves,  and 
moves  with  a  self-evident  intelligence.  There  is  a  beauty 
in  nature  which  is  as  definitely  an  achievement  of  life 
as  the  Gothic  aisles  of  Westminster  Abbey  are  an  achieve¬ 
ment  of  architecture.  There  is  an  order  in  nature  which 
is  as  certainly  good  evidence  for  purpose  as  any  enact¬ 
ment  on  the  statute  book.  Things  are  not  irrational. 
Man  is  not  the  sole  possessor  of  mind.  Let  common 
sense  give  the  verdict  in  this  dispute :  whether  a  blind 
and  random  evolution  brought  mind  into  existence,  or 
whether  a  preceding  mind  ordained  evolution? 

Socrates  in  dialogue  with  Darwin  would  have  stopped 
him  at  almost  every  step  in  his  thesis,  asking  him  to 
define  such  prodigious  terms  as  “struggle,”  “growth,” 
“origin,”  and  “selection,”  needing  no  lovely  tinted  feather 
from  the  tail  of  a  peacock  to  confute  him  with  that  emi¬ 
nent  aspiration  after  beauty  which  is  the  very  soul  of 
evolution.  The  strength  of  all  his  thinking  lay  in  a  keen 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


25 


perception  of  the  fact  which  dangerous  or  cunning  words 
attempt  to  describe  and  never  can  define. 

We  must  not  minimise  one  influence  of  Socrates  that 
is  generally  regarded  as  dangerous.  His  method  did,  un¬ 
doubtedly,  encourage  a  fruitless  rationalism.  In  men 
who  had  no  inward  life,  who  did  not  feel  beauty  like  a 
passion,  and  whose  sense  of  wonder  did  not  move  in  them 
like  a  prayer,  the  Socratic  method  made  for  an  unlovely 
form  of  agnosticism — a  smooth  and  smirking  agnostic¬ 
ism  well-pleased  with  itself,  and  with  no  wistful  long¬ 
ing  for  spiritual  satisfaction.  We  do  not  quarrel  with 
him  for  teaching  that  ethical  and  political  problems  can 
be  solved  by  an  appeal  to  the  first  principles  of  reason; 
nor  do  we  think  that  a  right-minded  man  would  mis¬ 
understand  his  thesis  that  truth  is  to  be  reached,  if  at  all, 
by  analytic  criticism  of  received  opinion.  But  we  can  see 
that  in  practice — men  being  what  they  are — such  a  teach¬ 
ing  would  lead  among  the  general  to  a  barren  agnostic¬ 
ism,  and  an  unlovely  temper.  Only  the  noblest  man  of 
science,  or  the  true  saint,  would  understand  the  confes¬ 
sion  of  Socrates  that  “he  nothing  knew  save  that  he 
nought  did  know.” 

It  should  not  be  necessary,  I  think,  to  defend  Socrates 
from  the  charge  of  obscurantism.  It  is  true  that  he  re¬ 
lied  chiefly  on  intuition  and  common  sense  for  his  theory 
of  existence.  It  is  true,  also,  that  like  most  Athenians 


26 


SEVEN  AGES 


before  the  days  of  Aristotle  he  doubted  the  value  of 
physical  science.  But  physical  science  in  the  days  of 
Socrates  was  science  in  the  kindergarten :  it  meant  guess¬ 
ing  at  the  origin  of  the  universe,  an  object  condemned  in 
these  latter  days  by  none  more  sharply  and  decisively  than 
the  physicist.  Socrates  only  doubted  the  wisdom  of 
spending  one’s  life  in  such  guesswork.  He  made  fun  of 
the  people  who  mistook  such  airy  guesswork  for  the 
firm  ground  of  knowledge.  He  said  that  the  great  object 
of  life  was  to  live  in  communion  with  the  eternal  ideas 
of  truth,  goodness,  and  beauty;  and  of  all  the  forms  of 
truth  that  which  seemed  to  him  obviously  the  most  im¬ 
portant  for  mankind  was  the  inward  and  spiritual  truth 
of  a  man’s  personality.  A  true  man  seeking  goodness 
and  reverent  before  the  majesty  of  the  universe  was  the 
good  citizen  and  the  man  most  dear  to  God. 

Did  he  fail?  Yes,  if  his  purpose  was  to  save  the 
political  fabric  of  Greek  civilisation.  But  it  would  seem 
that  Socrates  had  no  such  purpose  in  his  soul.  His  pur¬ 
pose  was  rather  to  create  in  the  mind  of  the  human  race 
a  living  sense  of  the  divine,  to  free  it  from  superstition, 
to  save  it  from  intellectual  vanity,  to  deliver  it  from  all 
delusion.  In  this  he  has  not  altogether  failed.  The  un¬ 
dulating  ascent  of  humanity  does  indeed  show  the  swift 
downward  swerve  to  materialism,  but  always  that  descent 
is  followed  by  the  steep  upward  curve  of  idealism;  and 
in  all  those  periods  of  upward  ascent  the  spirit  of  the 


THE  AGE  OF  SOCRATES 


27 


human  race  ever  renews  the  freshness  of  its  dawn  in  the 
tranquil  radiance  of  Socratic  common  sense. 

His  spirit  is  unmistakably,  I  think,  a  characteristic  of 
Anglo-Saxon  personality.  Until  the  days  of  Darwin  the 
philosophy  of  our  forefathers  was  marked  by  earnest¬ 
ness  without  austerity,  by  reverence  and  modesty  without 
servility,  by  a  robust  common  sense  unmarred  by  the 
truculence  of  a  little  learning,  misled  by  none  of  the  shifts 
of  pedagogic  casuistry.  The  same  playfulness  which  pre¬ 
serves  for  us  the  freshness  of  Socratic  conversation  is  to 
be  found  in  all  the  immortal  pages  of  English  thought. 
The  one  note  which  is  absent  there  is  that  of  cocksure¬ 
ness,  a  note  which  never  issued  from  the  soul  of  Socrates. 
And  as  Socrates  was  haunted  by  divine  things,  so  were 
our  forefathers;  and  as  they  laid  their  chief  emphasis  on 
an  inward  probity  and  not  on  any  outward  ceremonial, 
so  also  did  Socrates.  In  all  our  Anglo-Saxon  morality 
there  has  ever  been  that  element  of  Puritanism  which 
the  effeminate  Pater  detects  and  dislikes  in  Socrates :  a 
masculine  and  sturdy  conviction  that  inward  honesty  is  of 
more  moment  to  a  man  and  to  a  nation  than  pretensions 
however  impressive  and  achievements  however  brilliant. 

When  we  think  of  the  character  of  Socrates  we  think 
of  the  highest  type  of  Englishman.  We  think  of  his 
reliance  on  good  sense;  of  his  dislike  of  exaggeration ;  of 
his  unfanatical  religiousness;  of  his  tolerance,  of  his  self- 


2  8 


SEVEN  AGES 


consistency;  of  his  gentleness,  his  playfulness,  his  serenity, 
his  unshakable  fortitude,  his  unconquerable  goodness,  his 
courtesy.  He  meets  us  in  Chaucer,  meets  us  in  Sir 
Thomas  More,  meets  us  in  John  Bunyan,  meets  us  in  Doc¬ 
tor  Johnson.  His  spirit  is  our  spirit.  He  is  the  soul  of 
all  that  stands  most  firmly  in  the  character  of  England. 

We  forget,  in  forgetting  our  Greek,  that  there  were 
times  in  English  history  when  the  spirit  of  Socrates  was 
more  real  to  our  fathers  than  the  spirit  of  Shakespeare; 
when  the  qualities  of  his  mind  became  the  admired  ob¬ 
ject  of  English  character ;  and  when  the  Socratic  wisdom 
was  the  criterion  for  English  wisdom.  Our  fathers  saw 
in  him  a  man  to  whom  the  existence  of  God  was  the 
supreme  reality,  who  in  the  consciousness  of  that  reality 
lived  a  cheerful  and  self-consistent  life  of  pre-eminent 
goodness,  and  who  met  in  the  faith  of  that  reality  a 
martyr’s  death  without  a  word  of  complaint  and  without 
a  gesture  which  was  not  seemly.  They  came  to  think 
about  him  while  their  children  played  at  being  Hector  and 
Achilles,  and  so  they  became  like  him.  Our  heredity 
reaches  far  back  through  the  disordered  ages  of  a  quar¬ 
relling  Europe  and  a  warring  Christendom  to  this  calm 
and  playful  teacher  of  rational  idealism. 

Thus  has  the  character  of  Socrates  the  same  inherit¬ 
ance  of  immortality  as  that  which  Shelley  felt  in  the 
poetry  of  Keats.  It  is  made  one  with  nature — our  nature. 
It  is  a  part  of  the  civilisation  of  the  human  person.  It 
is  an  indestructible  power  in  the  conscience  of  mankind. 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 
(384-322  b.c.) 


29 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 
(384-322  B.C.) 

In  the  year  366  b.c.,  Socrates  being  then  dead  thirty- 
three  years,  there  came  to  Athens  from  the  royal  court 
of  Macedon  a  delicate  lisping  youth  of  seventeen,  with 
money  to  throw  into  the  lap  of  folly  and  a  desire  to 
take  his  place  among  the  fashionable  young  men  of  the 
Greek  metropolis. 

This  youth,  Aristoteles  of  Stageira  known  for  that 
reason  as  the  Stagirite,  reminds  us  a  little  at  the  outset 
of  his  career  in  Athens  of  Benjamin  Disraeli.  He  was 
an  outlander  in  the  eyes  of  those  whose  favour  he 
courted,  and  he  endeavoured  to  make  an  impression  upon 
them  by  the  extravagance  of  his  dress,  the  richness  of 
his  jewels,  and  the  cynical  flippancy  of  his  conduct.  They 
called  him  “the  vain  and  chattering  Aristotle.”  But  like 
Disraeli,  the  foppishness  of  Aristotle  was  by  no  means 
the  whole  of  him;  rather  was  it  a  ring  on  his  finger,  an 
ornament  put  on  for  the  satisfaction  of  a  nature  am¬ 
bitious  of  attention.  Behind  the  fop  was  a  man,  and 
within  the  man  a  spiritual  energy  of  commanding  power. 

By  what  means  he  was  attracted  to  the  school  of  Plato 

31 


32 


SEVEN  AGES 


we  do  not  know ;  it  may  have  been  that  he  regarded  it  as 
a  fashionable  diversion,  or  that  finding  it  impossible  to 
keep  pace  with  the  athletic  youth  of  Athens  either  in  their 
vices  or  their  games,  he  turned  with  a  fresh  vigour  of 
ambition  to  a  sphere  of  action  which  promised  quicker 
access  to  distinction  for  so  weak  a  stomach.  In  any  case, 
we  know  that  he  soon  turned  from  dissipation  to  philoso¬ 
phy,  and  that  for  twenty  stormy  years  in  Greek  history 
he  remained  in  the  school  of  Plato. 

Socrates,  as  we  have  seen,  spent  his  life  in  redeeming 
the  individual  man.  A  grand  simplicity  was  the  mark  of 
his  teaching.  He  avoided  all  the  pitfalls  and  the  gins 
of  intellectualism.  No  logician  ever  caught  his  soul  in 
a  trap,  m>  metaphysician  ever  enticed  his  feet  into  a  fog 
of  words,  and  no  politician  ever  deluded  him  with  the 
minor  passion  of  sectarianism.  There  he  stood  in  the 
falling  twilight  of  Athenian  glory,  his  feet  planted  with 
unshakable  firmness  on  the  rock  of  common  sense,  teach¬ 
ing  individual  men  to  lean  the  weight  of  their  lives  on 
the  eternal  realities  of  existence,  and  bidding  them  search 
within  their  souls  for  the  divine  truth  which  alone  could 
set  them  free  from  delusion.  With  smile,  jest,  and  cun¬ 
ning  question  he  brought  to  silence  all  the  enemies  of 
man’s  inward  peace,  not  only  the  teacher  of  sensualism 
and  the  unprofitable  politician,  but  even  the  philosopher 
of  wisdom  whose  speculations  spread  their  wings  on 
words  which  darkened  the  plain  daylight  of  common 


Photo  Alinari 


ARISTOTLE 

Rome,  National  Museum 


■ 

V;"  -  :  . 

■ 


# 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


33 


sense.  Like  a  mother,  quieting  the  fears  of  her  children, 
and  guarding  them  both  from  dangerous  animals  and 
incompetent  protectors,  Socrates  stood  in  that  falling  twi¬ 
light  of  Athenian  glory  which,  because  of  him,  was  to 
become  the  morning  of  a  new  civilisation,  speaking  of 
God  and  the  soul,  of  right  and  wrong,  of  true  and  false, 
in  speech  as  homely  as  ever  fell  upon  Athenian  ears. 

His  words  and  his  personality  have  descended  to  us 
chiefly  from  one  of  his  disciples  who  was  at  almost  every 
point  his  heretic.  Socrates  sought  to  change  the  human 
being :  Plato  to  change  the  world.  Socrates  never  wrote 
a  line :  Plato  was  the  author  of  numerous  controversial 
books.  Socrates  never  ventured  into  the  territory  of 
intellectualism  except  to  expose  its  poverty  and  absurdi¬ 
ties  :  Plato  lived  in  no  other  country.  An  aristocrat  of 
almost  regal  beauty,  maintaining  himself  in  a  style  of 
great  dignity,  falling  into  the  sins  of  his  time  and  class, 
teaching  philosophy  rather  as  an  art  than  as  a  religion, 
Plato  differs  from  the  old  Puritan  stone-cutter  his  master 
as  the  climate  of  Jamaica  differs  from  the  climate  of 
Scotland,  or  as  the  Gospel  according  to  John  differs 
from  the  Gospel  according  to  Mark.  Nevertheless  it  is 
from  him  more  than  from  any  other  man  that  we  get 
our  Socrates;  but  it  was  the  creative  personality  of  So¬ 
crates,  so  rich  in  inspiration,  which  gave  us  our  Plato. 

Aristotle  soon  attracted  the  notice  of  this  intellectual 
mystic  who  was  seeking  to  reorganise  the  whole  of  human 


34 


SEVEN  AGES 


life.  There  was  between  them  an  affection  controlled 
by  the  knowledge  of  their  mental  differences.  Plato 
would  at  one  moment  call  Aristotle  the  genius  of  his 
school,  and  at  the  next  laugh  at  him  for  seeking  truth 
in  books.  “There  is  the  house  of  the  reader,”  he  would 
say,  in  passing  the  dwelling  of  Aristotle,  and  go  on  to 
his  own  house,  there  to  write  books  which  he  must  have 
known  would  be  read  as  long  as  men  have  eyes. 

Like  Socrates,  Plato  never  read  a  manuscript.  But 
while  Socrates  refused  to  read  a  book  because  the  author 
was  not  by  to  answer  questions,  Plato  in  the  power  of  his 
comprehensive  intellect  brushed  the  library  away  with  a 
contemptuous  disdain  for  all  the  toilsome  knowledge  of 
the  past,  artistically  minded,  with  the  Periclean  world 
falling  about  his  ears,  to  establish  a  new  humanity  on 
foundations  of  spiritual  reality. 

It  would  take  a  volume,  indeed  many  volumes  have 
already  been  written  on  the  matter,  to  show  the  intel¬ 
lectual  differences  which  separated  Plato  from  Aristotle, 
differences  almost  as  great  as  those  which  separated 
Plato  from  Socrates.  Our  purpose  may  be  served,  how¬ 
ever,  by  seeing  in  this  simple  difference  over  books  the 
fundamental  divergence  of  soul  which  separated  the  two 
men,  the  master  and  the  pupil,  and  afterwards  separated 
the  world  of  thought  into  two  camps  of  Platonists  and 
Aristotelians.  “Every  man,”  said  Coleridge,  “is  born 
an  Aristotelian  or  a  Platonist.  I  do  not  think  it  possible 
that  anyone  born  an  Aristotelian  can  become  a  Platonist ; 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


35 


and  I  am  sure  no  born  Platonist  can  ever  change  into  an 
Aristotelian.  They  are  the  two  classes  of  men,  beside 
which  it  is  next  to  impossible  to  conceive  a  third.” 

Plato,  until  almost  the  end  of  his  life,  was  faithful  to 
the  teaching  of  Socrates  in  one  important  particular:  he 
sought  truth  with  his  soul.  It  was  by  introspection  and 
by  contemplation  that  he  arrived  at  his  theory  of  the 
divine  reality.  He  studied  things  only  to  arrive  at  ideas. 
The  visible  caught  his  eye  only  that  his  soul  might  be¬ 
hold  the  invisible.  Afterwards,  it  is  true,  he  intellectua- 
lised  the  theory  of  a  divine  reality  and  committed  it  to 
writing,  and  involved  himself  in  grave  rational  difficulties 
and  many  contradictions;  but  the  sense  of  all  his  match¬ 
less  writings  was  inspiration,  the  inspiration  which  comes 
from  profound  contemplation  of  living  forms  and  a 
piercing  vision  able  to  comprehend  the  unseen  idea 
breathing  through  the  transitory  shape  of  all  things  visi¬ 
ble  to  the  eye. 

His  teaching  was  also  faithful  to  the  Socratic  tradi¬ 
tion.  Stripped  of  its  luminous  beauty  of  expression,  and 
disentangled  from  its  intellectual  profundities,  his  teach¬ 
ing  is  the  simple  message  of  Socrates  that  behind  every 
living  form  there  is  the  divine  reality  of  life  itself,  and 
that  it  is  with  this  transcendent  reality  that  the  soul  of 
man  should  be  concerned.  "We  carry  with  us,”  says  Sir 
Thomas  Browne,  “the  wonders  we  seek  without  us”; 
and,  forestalling  Goethe  and  Carlyle,  he  adds:  “There  is 


36 


SEVEN  AGES 


all  Africa  and  her  prodigies  in  us ;  we  are  that  bold  and 
adventurous  piece  of  Nature,  which  he  that  studies  wisely 
learns  in  a  compendium  what  others  labour  at  in  a  di¬ 
vided  piece  and  endless  volume.”  But  whereas  Socrates 
had  no  other  ambition  than  to  convert  the  individual 
person  from  folly  to  wisdom,  from  delusion  to  truth, 
Plato,  on  the  other  hand,  was  almost  as  contemptuous 
of  the  individual  as  he  was  of  books,  and  sought  by  his 
teaching  to  establish  a  new  humanity,  or,  at  any  rate,  a 
new  basis  for  the  perfect  state.  He  was  a  politician 
moving  in  the  world  of  mathematics  and  a  mathematician 
employing  the  language  of  politics. 

Now,  Aristotle  himself  is  not  to  be  set  up  against  the 
mystical  Plato  as  a  materialist.  He  believed  in  God. 
For  centuries,  indeed,  he  was  regarded  as  a  chief  pillar 
of  Catholic  scholarship.  All  the  fragments  left  behind 
him  after  a  life  which  still  has  no  rival  for  wide-ranging 
industry  have  been  turned  over  and  over  by  the  theo¬ 
logians  of  the  Christian  religion  to  justify  their  central 
position.  It  is  true  that  the  Church  found  out  the  mis¬ 
take  of  the  schoolmen  and  ordered  Aristotle’s  works  to  be 
burned,  and  not  only  burned ;  their  contents  were  ordered 
to  be  forgotten  by  those  who  had  read  them !  But  if  the 
Church  was  afraid  of  him,  the  Arabs  and  the  Moors  were 
not,  and  to  this  day  the  Stagirite  is  foundational  to  the 
theological  philosophy  of  those  religious  peoples. 

Aristotle  not  only  believed  in  God,  he  spent  the  best 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


37 


powers  of  his  brain  in  proving  the  reasonableness  of  the 
divine  theory.  Further,  he  was  a  teacher  of  ethics,  in 
his  own  conduct  a  purer  person  than  Plato,  and  his  atti¬ 
tude  to  the  universe,  particularly  to  the  stars,  those  bright 
worlds  which  thrilled  him  to  poesy,  is  one  of  reverence 
and  humility.  In  what  respect,  then,  does  he  differ  from 
his  master?  How  has  it  come  to  pass  that  from  teachers 
so  like  each  other  the  world  of  thinking  men  has  become 
divided  into  two  opposing  camps? 

It  is  a  question  of  method.  While  Plato  debated  the 
universe  with  his  own  soul,  Aristotle  consulted  the 
writers  of  antiquity  for  information  and  discussed  the 
structure  of  living  forms  and  the  habits  of  living  crea¬ 
tures  with  fishermen  and  shepherds,  huntsmen  and  peas¬ 
ants,  travellers  and  sailors.  Alexander  the  Great,  whom 
he  had  tutored  for  a  few  years,  sent  to  Athens  from  the 
lands  his  armies  were  invading  specimens  and  informa¬ 
tion  for  the  use  of  the  Stagirite,  who  in  his  own  house 
was  watching  the  egg  of  a  hen  turn  into  a  chick  or 
writing  an  account  of  nest-building  fishes. 

Now  if  Aristotle  had  aroused  the  amusement  of  Plato 
by  his  habit  of  reading  books,  he  courted  the  disdainful 
contempt  of  all  the  philosophers  at  Athens  by  this  method 
of  study.  Indeed,  it  shows  to  us  in  Aristotle  a  courage 
scarcely  less  honourable  than  the  courage  of  Socrates 
that  he,  an  outlander  from  the  hated  court  of  Macedonia, 
should  have  thus  braved  the  contumely  of  Athenian  cul- 


38 


SEVEN  AGES 


ture  by  descending  from  the  peaks  of  philosophy  to  grub 
for  knowledge  in  the  base  earth  of  natural  history.  Yet 
it  was  this  method,  so  contemptible  in  the  eyes  of  Athens, 
and  destined  to  die  out  only  a  few  years  after  Aristotle’s 
death,  which,  reviving  in  the  Middle  Ages,  eventually 
divided  the  world  into  two  camps  and  brought  the  Stagi- 
rite  to  a  throne  of  glory  in  the  affections  of  modern 
Europe. 

He  was  the  first  thinker  of  commanding  genius  to 
recall  philosophy  from  star-gazing  and  day-dreaming  to 
the  facts  of  man’s  terrestrial  existence.  It  was  not  what 
he  said  that  changed  the  world;  it  was  what  he  did.  The 
theories  of  Aristotle  have  done  nothing  for  truth,  but  the 
effect  of  Aristotle  has  been  enormous.  No  thinker  of 
such  eminence  ever  made  more  bad  shots  at  the  truth  of 
things  than  he  did;  no  theorist  ever  went  more  journeys 
into  blank  absurdity  than  did  this  ravenous  seeker  of 
truth ;  but  he  studied  nature,  examined  her,  dissected  her, 
classified  her,  brought  her  into  an  intellectual  order,  and 
thus  not  only  created  the  new  science  of  natural  history, 
but  laid  the  foundations  of  all  the  positive  sciences. 

Reflect  that  in  launching  his  method  on  the  sea  of  time 
Aristotle  was  more  powerfully  affecting  the  destinies  of 
the  human  race  than  Alexander  the  Great  at  the  head 
of  his  conquering  armies.  “Aristotle  was,  and  still  is,” 
says  Coleridge,  “the  sovereign  lord  of  the  understand- 

•  9  9 

ing. 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


39 


The  two  camps  of  Platonists  and  Aristotelians  are  now 
committed  to  the  methods  of  the  Stagirite.  No  longer 
does  the  philosophy  of  mysticism  rely  on  the  intuitions, 
no  longer  do  the  teachings  of  spiritual  reality  ignore  the 
investigations  of  physical  science.  Aristotle  is  the 
world’s  great  teacher,  its  sole  teacher,  of  method;  and  it 
may  be  said  that  Bergson  is  as  greatly  in  his  debt  for  a 
spiritual  interpretation  of  evolution  as  the  schoolmen  of 
the  Middle  Ages  were  his  debtors  for  a  theology  which 
powerfully  affected  the  destinies  of  Europe.  Neverthe¬ 
less,  the  influence  of  Aristotle  has  been  chiefly  on  the 
side  of  materialism,  and  it  is  as  the  unconscious  parent  of 
a  mechanistic  philosophy  that  we  must  regard  him  in 
this  chapter  of  the  mind’s  history. 

It  is  a  curious  fact  that  the  father  of  materialism  was 
opposed  to  nearly  every  doctrine  on  which  materialism 
now  rests — including  the  sphericity  of  the  earth.  He  did 
not  believe  that  the  world  has  come  to  be  what  it  is  from 
something  so  vastly  different  as  to  be  utterly  unlike  it,  or 
that  living  forms  had  acquired  their  shape  and  their  pro¬ 
pensities  from  a  long  struggle  with  environment.  On  the 
contrary,  he  opposed  himself  to  the  Darwinism  of  his 
day,  and  taught  with  authority  that  everything  man  sees 
has  always  been  from  the  first  what  it  now  is.  More¬ 
over,  he  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  any  theory  which 
leaves  a  door  open  on  the  universe  for  the  entrance  of 
accident;  he  believed  in  purpose  as  completely  as  So- 


40 


SEVEN  AGES 


crates  did,  and  criticised  the  ideas  of  Empedocles  and 
Democritus  which  challenged  the  time-honoured  principle 
of  teleology.  “Nature,”  he  said,  “makes  nothing  with¬ 
out  a  purpose.”  He  admitted  that  the  rational  principle 
and  moving  force  in  the  universe  can  be  frustrated  by 
the  refractory  and  irrational  material  in  which  it  works, 
but  he  insisted  that  this  moving  force  does  nothing  with¬ 
out  a  rational  purpose 

When  we  examine  his  teaching  to  discover  in  what 
matter  it  so  differs  from  Plato’s  that  one  is  regarded 
as  the  fountain-head  of  mysticism  and  the  other  as  the 
headwaters  of  materialism,  we  find  that  the  difference 
lies  in  their  conceptions  of  God.  This  difference,  so 
formidable  in  its  bare  statement,  need  not,  however,  take 
us  far  afield  from  the  straight  path  of  simplicity.  It 
can  be  reduced  to  the  plainest  expression. 

Both  these  men  believed  in  God ;  but  while  Plato  brings 
Him  everywhere,  in  the  soul  of  man  as  well  as  in  the 
starry  firmament,  in  the  heart  and  consciousness  of 
humanity  as  well  as  in  the  uttermost  confines  of  the  uni¬ 
verse,  Aristotle  set  Him  afar  off  in  unimaginable  distance 
from  the  earth,  throned  in  a  majesty  and  perfection  in¬ 
conceivably  sublime,  aloft  the  understanding  of  the 
human  mind,  and  engaged  in  an  act  of  everlasting  self¬ 
contemplation  from  which  the  soul  of  man  is  of  neces¬ 
sity  excluded. 

Ritter,  Preller,  and  others  assume  that  Plato’s  idea  of 
the  Good  is  much  the  same  as  Aristotle’s  deity,  but  where 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


4i 


in  Aristotle  shall  we  find  such  a  teaching  as  Plato’s  that 
God,  being  good,  wishes  everything  to  resemble  Himself  ? 
The  effect  of  Plato,  in  any  case,  is  to  bring  God  near  to 
the  soul  of  man.  Professor  Burnet  says  of  him  that  he 
has  “left  us  the  first  systematic  defence  of  Theism.” 

The  inference  from  these  two  conceptions  is  obvious. 
The  Platonist  seeks  to  deepen,  to  heighten,  to  intensify 
his  sensation  of  God,  seeks,  that  is,  as  the  supreme  good 
of  life,  to  make  the  nearness  of  the  divine  the  centre  of 
his  consciousness.  The  Aristotelian,  on  the  contrary, 
whether  he  choose  to  call  himself  atheist  or  agnostic, 
turns  his  attention  away  from  a  matter  so  remote  that  for 
him  at  least  it  is  without  reality,  and  endeavours  to  piece 
together  such  fragments  of  the  creative  Will  which  he 
finds  scattered  in  multitudinous  confusion  over  this  little 
earth  or  in  the  shining  fields  of  the  stellar  universe.  He 
becomes,  not  the  poet  or  the  mystic,  but  the  man  of 
science — the  astronomer,  the  biologist,  the  chemist,  the 
geologist,  the  botanist,  and  the  bacteriologist. 

Aristotle,  whose  God  was  merely  the  source  of  move¬ 
ment,  the  First  Mover  who  Himself  is  never  moved,  de¬ 
fined  the  soul  as  a  principle  of  energy,  without  substance, 
and  inseparable  from  matter.  Yet,  when  he  came  to  ex¬ 
amine  the  intelligence  of  this  soul  he  pronounced  it  to  be 
indestructible,  immortal,  and  divine.  He  does  not 
separate  soul  from  body,  but  distinguishes  between  the 
intelligence  of  the  soul  and  the  soul  itself.  The  soul  is  the 


42 


SEVEN  AGES 


marble  from  which  the  statue  is  chiselled,  the  statue  is 
its  intelligence.  The  soul  is  the  eye,  the  vision  of  the  eye 
is  the  intelligence  of  the  soul.  The  soul  is  the  seed,  the 
intelligence  of  the  soul  is  the  flower.  “It  is  further 
matter  of  doubt,”  he  says,  “whether  soul,  as  the  perfect 
realisation  of  body,  may  not  stand  to  body  as  a  sailor  to 
his  boat” — showing  that  his  reason  was  in  difficulty. 
Why  did  he  not  say  that  soul  is  to  the  body  as  the  sculp¬ 
tor  is  to  the  marble  or  as  the  gardener  is  to  the  flower  ? 

So  far  as  this  confusion  can  be  understood  at  all,  it 
would  seem  to  argue  that  the  person  dies  with  the  col¬ 
lapse  of  the  physical  organism  and  that  the  intelligent 
life,  sans  love,  sans  aspiration,  sans  memory,  sans  charac¬ 
ter,  sans  personality,  returns  to  the  unknowable  Mover 
who  Himself  is  never  moved.  Thus  a  man  may  feel  he 
is  immortal,  may  indeed  inherit  immortality,  but  cease 
to  possess  this  knowledge  and  fail  to  be  conscious  of  his 
inheritance  when  he  has  got  it.  In  other  words,  death 
robs  him  of  self-consciousness. 

With  such  a  conception  of  soul,  Aristotle  devoted  his 
great  powers  of  mind  to  rationalise  conduct.  None  of 
his  works  has  come  closer  to  the  bones  and  business  of 
mankind  than  the  Nichomachean  Ethics.  Here  he  sets 
himself  to  lead  mankind  into  the  path  of  happiness,  using 
his  practical  reason  and  leaving  immortality  out  of  the 
account.  It  is  a  case  of  a  grammarian  coming  on  the 
scene  after  language  has  been  spoken  for  immemorial 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


43 


years,  not  to  clear  up  the  mystery  of  language,  but  to 
explain  to  mankind  that  this  word  is  a  noun,  that  a  verb, 
and  this  again  is  an  adjective.  Virtue,  we  learn,  is  a 
synonym  both  for  happiness  and  prudence.  It  is  natural 
for  a  man  to  seek  happiness,  and  in  seeking  happiness  he 
is  seeking  virtue,  and  he  has  only  to  look  about  him  to 
see  that  virtue  is  another  word  for  prudence.  Courage, 
for  example,  is  a  virtue;  but  if  a  man’s  courage  lead  him 
to  run  into  unnecessary  danger  he  ceases  to  be  a  prudent 
man  and  so  loses  his  happiness. 

The  good  man,  says  our  philosopher,  is  at  unity  with 
himself,  and  what  he  desires,  desires  with  all  his  soul, 
wishing  for  himself  what  seems,  and  indeed  is,  good; 
doing  good — for  it  is  his  nature  to  work  out  that  which 
is  good — -for  its  own  sake;  that  is  to  say,  for  the  sake  of 
his  reason,  which  appears  to  be  a  man’s  true  self. 

When  we  learn  where  Aristotle  looked  for  his  idea  of 
virtue  we  perceive  at  once  the  defect  of  the  Aristotelian 
temperament.  He  looked,  and  he  directed  his  disciples  to 
look,  at  that  political  aggregation  of  men  which  we  call 
the  state.  There,  for  him,  was  the  grand  stage  on  which 
virtue  might  be  seen  in  all  its  moral  glory.  A  man  had 
only  to  contemplate  society  in  order  to  distinguish  clearly 
between  right  and  wrong,  that  is  to  say,  between  prudence 
and  imprudence,  between  acts  which  were  good  and  acts 
which  were  bad,  between  conduct  which  was  wise  or  safe 
and  conduct  which  was  foolish  and  dangerous. 


44 


SEVEN  AGES 


No  great  teacher  ever  looked  so  far  afield  from  him¬ 
self  as  Aristotle,  no  thinker  was  ever  a  greater  stranger 
to  his  own  soul.  He  broke  away  from  the  Socratic  sim¬ 
plicity  of  introspection  and  intuition;  he  broke  away,  if 
not  from  Platonism,  at  any  rate  from  the  course  of  Pla¬ 
tonic  speculation.  For  the  Stagirite,  although  he  re¬ 
garded  the  universe  as  a  system  of  ideas,  and  saw  in  every 
species  of  created  things  an  idea  of  the  divine  mind,  still 
truth  was  a  thing  to  be  sought  in  the  world  outside  the 
human  mind,  the  physical  and  political  world  which 
existed  rather  for  man’s  examination  than  for  his  con¬ 
templation.  There  he  lived,  and  moved,  and  had  his 
being,  and  even  there  only  on  the  surface  of  things. 
Truly  has  it  been  said  of  this  indefatigable  observer  of 
living  things  that  the  more  he  looked  the  less  he  saw. 
More  clearly  and  decisively  than  any  of  his  predecessors 
he  observed  the  forms  of  living  things,  but  never  ob¬ 
tained  “glimpses  of  the  great  maxims  of  creation,  of  the 
mysterious  workshop  of  God.”  “Aristotle  doth  but 
instruct  us,”  said  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  “as  Plato  did 
him;  that  is,  to  confute  himself.”  He  was  the  first  in¬ 
dexer  of  the  book  of  nature,  the  earliest  curator  of  this 
terrestrial  museum :  never  its  interpreter.  “What  is  all  in¬ 
tercourse  with  nature,”  asks  Goethe,  “if,  by  the  analytical 
method,  we  merely  occupy  ourselves  with  individual  ma¬ 
terial  parts,  and  do  not  feel  the  breath  of  the  spirit,  which 
prescribes  to  every  part  its  direction,  and  orders,  or  sanc¬ 
tions,  every  deviation  by  means  of  an  inherent  law?” 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


45 


We  must  be  careful  to  distinguish,  however,  between 
Aristotle  himself  and  the  materialism  which  has  since 
proceeded  from  his  method.  The  Stagirite  taught  that 
man  is  a  free  agent,  and  that  he  is  responsible  for  his 
conduct,  which  ought  to  be  of  the  highest  order.  “If 
virtue  depends  on  us,”  he  says,  “so  does  vice;  whenever 
it  is  in  our  sole  power  to  do  a  thing,  it  must  also  be  in  our 
power  not  to  do  it;  whenever  we  can  say  No,  we  may 
also  say  Yes.” 

There  is  no  fatalism  here,  no  determinism,  and  no 
blurring  of  the  line  which  separates  good  from  bad.  In¬ 
deed,  Aristotle,  in  spite  of  his  defective  method,  is  one 
of  the  world’s  greatest  moral  teachers.  Even  if  he  bids 
us  look,  not  within,  but  at  the  stage  of  politics  for  our 
idea  of  virtue,  he  is  careful  to  teach  that  “Society  origi¬ 
nates  in  the  need  of  a  livelihood,  but  it  exists  for  the  sake 
of  life.”  And  when  we  come  to  ask  him  what  he  means 
by  the  term  “life,”  we  discover  that  he  regards  existence 
as  a  work  of  art,  and  that  life  is  that  energy  of  matter 
which  is  for  ever  seeking  to  fulfil  itself,  the  statue  emerg¬ 
ing  out  of  the  marble  and  the  flower  emerging  out  of 
the  seed.  He  never,  in  spite  of  all  his  wanderings,  lost 
sight  of  the  intelligence  in  creation,  or  of  the  purpose 
which  runs  throughout  the  works  of  nature.  If  his 
great  object  was  to  reorganise  all  knowledge,  still  he  saw 
the  soul  of  man  as  the  crown  and  glory  of  creation,  and 
believed  in  its  perfection  if  not  in  its  immortality.  “The 
soul,”  he  said,  “is  the  real  world.” 


46 


SEVEN  AGES 


He  overlooked  man’s  conscience,  but  he  glanced  at 
his  will,  finding  it  to  be  the  nature  of  the  soul,  as  much 
the  soul  itself  as  the  marble  is  the  statue.  When  the 
will  is  expressing  itself  without  impediment  and  with¬ 
out  rashness,  that  is  to  say,  when  its  action  utters  its 
true  nature,  then  it  is  happy;  and  he  distinguishes  be¬ 
tween  the  happiness  of  the  good  man  and  the  bad  man, 
between  the  happiness  which  ensures  an  ultimate  satis¬ 
faction  and  the  happiness  which  can  only  end  in  a  sense 
of  discordant  disappointment.  In  a  hundred  ways  he  lays 
himself  open  to  the  attack  of  the  materialist  who  has 
followed  his  method  to  a  conclusion  which  makes  a  chaos 
of  the  universe  and  whose  practical  reason  has  been  used 
to  make  nonsense  of  all  law  and  all  purpose.  But  for 
Aristotle  himself,  there  was  a  rational  gulf  between  the 
good  man  and  the  bad  man,  and  a  clear  call  of  the  reason 
to  choose  the  higher  rather  than  the  lower. 

If  Socrates  had  been  by  his  side  when  he  spoke  of 
“the  will,”  and  if  challenged,  as  surely  he  would  have 
been,  by  that  old  humorist  to  reflect  upon  so  strange  a 
term,  and  to  attempt  to  define  it,  it  is  possible  that 
Aristotle  might  have  left  posterity  with  a  clearer,  a  less 
cloudy  notion  of  the  soul,  and  with  a  more  hopeful  incen¬ 
tive  to  right  action. 

Our  admiration  for  the  man  must  be  almost  bound¬ 
less.  He  is  far  nearer  to  us  than  either  Socrates  or 
Plato:  less  eccentric  than  the  first,  of  a  nobler  conduct 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


47 


than  the  second ;  and,  after  all,  his  method  is  that  method 
of  science  which  has  enriched  modern  life  in  a  thousand 
directions  and  given  man  a  command  over  nature  which, 
on  the  whole,  is  for  the  great  benefit  of  the  human  race. 
He  is  the  practical  man  looking  out  on  nature  to  under¬ 
stand  her  ways,  finding  in  the  study  of  physical  things  a 
deep  pleasure  as  well  as  a  path  of  hope  to  greater  know¬ 
ledge  of  the  mystery  which  haunts  us,  living  a  good  life, 
and  meeting  its  adventures  with  a  sweet  and  genial  toler¬ 
ance.  We  see  him  walking  in  the  garden  at  Athens 
where  he  taught  the  truth  he  loved  even  more  than  Plato 
— both  were  dear  to  him,  he  said,  but  truth  the  dearer — 
walking  as  he  taught,  for  the  sake  of  his  health,  and 
then  returning  to  his  wife  and  children  in  whose  love 
he  rested  with  a  gratitude  that  persisted  to  his  life’s  end. 

That  his  position  at  Athens  must  always  have  been 
one  of  great  difficulty  is  clear  to  us  when  we  reflect 
that  while  he  listened  critically  to  the  lectures  of  Plato, 
Demosthenes  was  striving  to  rouse  the  degenerate 
Athenians  to  a  sense  of  their  danger  from  the  Macedon¬ 
ian  phalanx  marching  under  the  one-eyed  Philip  from 
victory  to  victory  on  the  Thessalian  plain,  threatening 
the  achievements  of  Pericles  with  shame,  and  the  wealth 
of  Athens  with  ruin.  Further,  after  the  assassination  of 
Philip  in  336,  his  son  Alexander  the  Great,  the  pupil 
and  the  friend  of  Aristotle,  became  master  of  Greece. 
Difficult  indeed  must  have  been  the  position  of  the  Stagi- 
rite  in  that  doomed  and  quarrelsome  city,  whose  soil,  as 


48 


SEVEN  AGES 


Demosthenes  said  in  the  bitterness  of  exile,  nurtured 
three  strange  monsters,  the  owl,  the  snake,  and  the 
people. 

He  was  a  man  who  followed  wisdom  in  a  time  of  un¬ 
paralleled  crisis,  who  was  liberal  and  generous,  who  never 
forgot  an  obligation,  whose  courage,  though  it  could  not 
face  martyrdom,  did  resist  prejudice  of  a  most  powerful 
order,  and  whose  heart,  rejecting  the  idea  of  immortality, 
sought  goodness  with  a  disinterested  affection,  and  with¬ 
out  cynicism  and  without  compromise. 

If  we  see  him  in  history  with  less  admiration  than 
we  see  him  in  the  shaded  walk  of  his  Athenian  garden, 
it  is  because  of  the  disastrous  effect  of  his  method  on 
men  of  smaller  stature.  The  father  of  Peter  Bell  may 
well  have  been  an  admirable  botanist.  Aristotle’s  method 
was  a  right  method,  but  it  was  only  partially  right.  He 
was  right  to  study  nature,  but  wrong  to  confine  his  study 
to  the  outside  of  nature.  He  was  right  to  insist  on  the 
value  of  investigating  living  forms,  but  wrong  to  leave 
out  of  his  investigation  the  life  which  gave  them  their 
philosophical  significance.  He  was  right  in  his  feeling  that 
physical  research  would  lead  to  a  vast  extension  of  know¬ 
ledge  but  wrong  to  divorce  that  form  of  inquiry  from 
the  Socratic  discipline  of  introspection. 

Well  has  Mr.  Alfred  Benn  said  of  him  that  wherever 
he  has  to  observe  or  to  report,  to  classify  or  to  com¬ 
pare,  whether  the  thing  be  a  mollusc  or  a  mammal,  a 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


49 


mouse  or  an  elephant,  he  is  only  a  little  way  below  the 
level  of  creative  genius;  but  wherever  the  line  between 
the  visible  and  the  invisible,  the  appearance  and  the  re¬ 
ality,  has  to  be  crossed,  there  his  powers  are  suddenly 
paralysed,  as  if  by  enchantment.1 

“Yet  what  a  mind  was  Aristotle’s!”  exclaimed 
Coleridge — “only  not  the  greatest  that  ever  animated  the 
human  form! — the  parent  of  science  properly  so  called, 
the  master  of  criticism,  and  the  founder  or  editor  of 
logic !  But  he  confounded  science  with  philosophy,  which 
is  an  error.” 

Because  of  this  fault  in  his  method  humanity  has 
often  wandered  into  the  wilderness  of  materialism,  far 
away  from  the  promised  land  of  creation;  and  if  from 
these  wanderings  it  has  returned  with  many  curious 
specimens  for  its  museums,  and  many  instructive  theories 
for  its  text-books  of  physical  science,  and  with  many 
valuable  contributions  for  wealth-seeking  industrialism, 
still,  forgetting  what  Signor  Ferrero  calls  “the  great 
doctrine  of  Aristotle  which  sets  forth  that  the  supreme 
aim  of  a  State  is  neither  riches  nor  power,  but  virtue,” 
it  has  increasingly  lost  something  of  that  spiritual  ap¬ 
prehension  which  dignifies  human  life  and  nourishes  the 
soul  on  the  sublimest  of  the  hopes  of  its  self-conscious¬ 
ness. 


*  The  Greek  Philosophers. 


50 


SEVEN  AGES 


What  bard, 

At  the  height  of  his  vision,  can  discern 
Of  God,  of  the  world,  of  the  soul, 

With  a  plainness  as  near, 

As  flashing  as  Moses  felt 

When  he  lay  in  the  night  by  his  flock 

On  the  starlit  Arabian  waste? 

Can  rise  and  obey 

The  beck  of  the  Spirit  like  him? 

Yes,  and  not  only  the  prophet,  not  only  the  exceptional 
man,  but  the  simplest  of  humanity’s  millions : 

What  girl 

Now  reads  in  her  bosom  as  clear 
As  Rebekah  read,  when  she  sate 
At  eve  by  the  palm-shaded  well? 

Who  guards  in  her  breast 
As  deep,  as  pellucid  a  spring 
Of  feeling,  as  tranquil,  as  sure? 

With  the  triumph  of  physical  science  there  has  been 
loss  of  intellectual  peace,  and  with  man’s  conquest  over 
nature  there  has  been  loss  of  spiritual  power.  Many 
have  made  the  discovery  that  it  is  indeed  possible  to  gain 
the  whole  world  and  yet  to  lose  the  soul  alive.  Many  are 
beginning  to  think  that  the  realism  of  physical  science  is 
the  realism  only  of  superficial  appearance.  “I  wish  they 
would  explain  their  explanations,”  cried  Byron,  and 
Darwin  was  yet  to  come. 


THE  AGE  OF  ARISTOTLE 


5i 


Turn  from  Aristotle’s  vain  attempts  to  define  the  great 
First  Mover  and  to  elucidate  the  functions  of  the  human 
soul — turn  from  these  intellectual  perplexities  to  the 
answer  of  the  dying  Socrates  when  Crito  asked  him  how 
he  would  wish  to  be  buried : 

“Just  as  you  please,  provided  that  you  can  lay  hold 
of  me.” 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 
{Circa  b.c.  3-a.d.  33) 


53 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 
( Circa  b.c.  3-A.D.  33) 

The  power  of  Greece  did  not  long  outlive  the  last  of 
her  great  philosophers.  A  little  more  than  a  century 
after  Aristotle’s  death  a  fleet  anchored  off  Athens 
representing  a  people  with  which  no  statesman  in  his 
time  had  reckoned,  a  people  not  from  the  east,  but  from 
the  west. 

After  subduing  Italy,  beating  back  her  hereditary 
enemy  the  Gauls,  and  at  last  conquering  the  stubborn 
Carthaginians,  Rome  subjugated  Greece,  and  from  that 
point  of  vantage  began  an  eastern  extension  of  her  Em¬ 
pire — an  empire  radically  different  from  any  other  in  the 
history  of  mankind. 

The  Assyrian  or  Egyptian  conqueror  of  other  nations 
had  endeavoured  to  make  fast  his  victories  by  breaking 
up  the  peoples  his  sword  had  subdued,  carrying  off 
numbers  of  them  to  work  as  slaves  in  his  own  country, 
driving  others  into  exile,  slaying  their  chiefs,  shattering 
the  altars  of  their  gods,  laying  waste  the  proudest  of 

55 


56 


SEVEN  AGES 


their  cities,  and  planting  out  their  lands  with  people 
from  his  own  dominions. 

The  Romans  followed  another  method.  They  de¬ 
stroyed  only  the  military  power  of  the  nations  conquered 
by  their  legions.  In  other  respects  the  national  life  was 
left  to  follow  its  traditional  course.  The  Romans  re¬ 
mained  to  keep  order  and  to  assist  in  the  development  of 
trade.  Wherever  their  eagles  went  they  established  peace, 
and  wherever  their  armies  encamped  they  reaped  ideas. 

Thus  it  came  about  that  this  proud  and  powerful 
nation,  giving  peace  to  the  world  and  laying  the  founda¬ 
tions  of  material  progress,  became  the  humble  disciples 
of  Greek  philosophy,  employing  the  Greek  language  for 
all  the  polite  purposes  of  life,  and  absorbing  into  their 
crude  religion  rites  and  ceremonies  which  were  already 
old  in  the  days  of  Romulus. 

When  Greeks  visited  Rome  for  the  first  time  the 
sight  which  most  astonished  them  was  the  great  central 
city  drain,  cloaca  maxima.  It  was  a  symbol  more 
wonderful  in  their  eyes  than  the  martial  eagle.  It  stood 
for  a  new  idea  in  the  human  mind.  It  represented  a 
region  of  thought  never  penetrated  by  any  of  their 
philosophers.  It  signified  a  field  of  policy  which  their 
statesmen  had  entirely  overlooked. 

Rome  was  the  first  engineer  among  the  nations,  the 
first  practical  intellect  among  the  peoples  of  the  earth. 
She  cherished  an  ideal  of  human  comfort  which  had 


! 


JESUS  CHRIST 

From  an  old  copper  print 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


57 


never  before  prescribed  itself  to  the  mind  of  man.  All 
her  imperialism,  the  noblest  of  its  kind,  was  founded 
upon  a  rational  domesticity.  It  was  not  her  mission  to 
interfere  with  the  rulings  of  the  gods;  it  was  not  her 
ambition  to  promote  the  interests  of  any  one  god  in 
particular.  Of  philosophy  she  was  ignorant.  To  pene¬ 
trate  the  secrets  of  personality  never  occurred  to  her. 
The  truth  with  which  she  concerned  herself  was  bounded 
by  the  domestic  life  of  man.  To  rationalise  that  life, 
to  make  it  prosperous  and  comfortable,  to  make  it 
safe  from  sword  and  pestilence,  to  give  it  a  sense  of 
abiding  security,  this,  and  this  only,  was  the  Roman 
mission. 

Among  the  many  peoples  brought  under  Roman 
power  and  benefited  by  its  superior  physical  culture, 
were  the  Jews  of  Palestine,  a  race  whose  history  is  a 
very  considerable  part  of  the  history  of  mankind. 

The  Jew  was  a  person  who  looked  back  to  a  fabulous 
past  and  forward  to  an  impossible  future.  He  looked 
back  to  a  time  when  his  fathers  talked  to  God,  when 
one  of  his  kings  ruled  over  peoples  as  numerous  as  “the 
sand  that  is  on  the  sea-shore/’  and  when  the  one  true 
God  whom  his  ancestors  worshipped  had  constantly  in¬ 
terfered  to  make  Israel  the  terror  of  the  heathen  and  the 
envy  of  all  nations.  He  looked  forward  to  a  time  when 
this  same  interposing  God  would  deliver  him  from  the 
hand  of  all  his  enemies,  set  up  the  throne  of  Israel  on  a 


58 


SEVEN  AGES 


foundation  which  should  never  be  shaken,  and  place  upon 
that  throne  one  of  His  celestial  creatures  formed  in  the 
likeness  of  a  man,  the  anointed  one,  the  Son  of  Man, 
who  would  reign  over  all  the  nations  of  the  earth. 

This  Jewish  view  of  history  was  the  consequence  of 
a  past  filled  with  calamity.  Israel  had  never  been  a  great 
power:  it  had  always  been  one  of  the  little  nations — 
those  little  nations  over  whose  territory  broke  constantly, 
almost  incessantly,  the  bloody  tide  of  war,  and  into  whose 
pious  domestic  life  was  thrust  again  and  again  the  ter¬ 
rible  enslaving  hand  of  a  heathen  imperialism.  Rich  in 
family  love,  proud  in  the  consciousness  of  a  moral  God 
infinitely  superior  to  the  wicked  gods  of  other  nations, 
and  passionately  devoted  to  his  fatherland,  the  Jew 
learned  to  hate  great  empires  with  an  exceeding  bitter 
hate,  and  in  the  power  of  this  excessive  hate  learned,  not 
only  to  bear  his  wretchedness  and  misery,  but  to  make 
himself  the  most  troublesome  of  all  the  little  nations 
swept  up  into  the  net  of  imperialism. 

At  the  time  of  Jesus,  this  intense  racialism  was  ex¬ 
pressing  itself  in  three  chief  ways.  There  was  the  great 
school  of  the  Pharisees  teaching  the  Jews  that  if  they 
wanted  God  to  break  the  chains  of  Rome  and  set  up  the 
throne  of  Israel  over  all  the  earth,  they  must  see  to  it 
that  the  Law  was  obeyed  in  every  minute  particular,  that 
sacred  Law  which  God  Himself  had  given  to  their  fore¬ 
fathers,  obedience  to  which  had  always  brought  freedom 
and  prosperity  in  the  past,  and  would  again,  disobedience 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS  59 

to  which  had  always  brought  the  retribution  of  defeat 
and  slavery. 

Another  party  in  the  nation  was  of  the  opinion  that 
God  would  help  them  only  if  they  first  helped  them¬ 
selves.  They  charged  the  Pharisees  with  an  unmanly 
spirit  of  defeatism,  and  went  about  stirring  up  the 
people  in  secret,  laying  plots  to  entrap  Roman  soldiers, 
conspiring  to  make  the  position  of  the  Roman  pro¬ 
curator  impossible,  working  underground  for  a  national 
uprising.  These  people  represented  the  party  of  physical 
force;  they  were  the  descendants  of  a  school  called  by 
Josephus  the  Fourth  Philosophy;  their  heirs  were  the 
Zealots,  and  finally  the  movement  disappeared  in  the 
bands  of  Sicarii,  who  dealt  in  assassination  and  whose 
object  was  a  reign  of  terror. 

With  these  so  different  forms  of  thought  went  the 
world-renouncing  school  of  the  Essenes  or  Esseans,  who 
retired  to  the  shores  of  the  Dead  Sea,  and  there,  as 
Pythagoras  had  done  in  Southern  Italy  five  centuries  be¬ 
fore,  formed  themselves  into  societies  apart  from  the 
world,  living,  it  is  thought,  as  vegetarians  and  com¬ 
munists,  waiting  in  a  spirit  of  prayer  for  the  coming  of 
God's  anointed  one,  the  Son  of  Man. 

To  all  these  three  schools  of  racialism  there  was  a 
party  in  the  nation  almost  as  odious  as  the  Roman 
power  itself,  namely,  the  rich  and  aristocratic  priest¬ 
hood,  who,  as  everybody  could  see,  “had  it  both  ways," 
enriching  themselves  from  the  patriotic  instinct  of  the 


6o 


SEVEN  AGES 


Jews,  and  enriching  themselves  still  further  by  acting  as 
agents  of  the  Roman  conqueror.  To  the  Jew,  who  must 
needs  worship  in  the  synagogue,  and  who  must  needs  go 
up  to  the  temple  in  Jerusalem,  these  proud  and  wealthy 
priests  presented  a  problem  of  the  supremest  difficulty. 
They  were  at  once  the  representative  and  the  traitor  of 
Israel’s  God. 

Jesus  was  born  in  Nazareth  or  Nazara,  a  little  town 
in  Galilee,  which  is  the  northern  province  of  Palestine. 
It  stands  on  the  side  of  a  hill,  from  whose  summit  a 
view  of  great  beauty  extends  to  the  mountains  of 
Samaria  and  to  the  blue  waters  of  the  Mediterranean. 
The  town  itself,  composed  of  one-roomed  cottages  built 
of  mountain  stone  or  burnt  clay,  rose  in  steep  terraces  on 
the  hillside,  with  fig-trees  and  palms  between  them,  and 
with  vines  clambering  over  the  walls.  The  chief  build¬ 
ing  was  the  synagogue;  the  friendliest  place  of  meeting, 
the  well. 

The  people  who  lived  here,  small  merchants  and 
artisans,  derived  their  meagre  wealth  from  the  people  of 
the  surrounding  country,  the  petty  cultivators,  the  shep¬ 
herds,  the  vine-dressers,  and  the  hired  labourers.  It 
would  seem  that  Jesus,  as  the  eldest  son,  must  have  made 
many  journeys  with  his  father,  who  was  a  builder,  into 
the  villages  round  about  Nazareth.  Nazareth  itself  could 
hardly  have  supported  a  family  of  at  least  seven  children. 
The  most  authentic  records  concerning  him  are  pictur- 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


61 


esque  with  his  references  to  country  sights  and  occupa¬ 
tions,  as  if  these  things  had  early  impressed  themselves 
upon  his  mind,  and  were  there  suggesting  themselves  to 
his  consciousness,  even  when  he  was  most  absorbed  in 
spiritual  teaching.  He  had  seen  the  vulture  hovering  in 
the  azure  deep  of  the  Syrian  sky,  and  the  hen  mothering 
its  chickens  in  the  dusty  courtyard  of  little  white  houses 
blistered  by  the  sun;  he  had  watched  the  sparrow  on 
housetops  and  listened  to  the  cooing  of  the  dove;  he  had 
observed  the  husbandman  sowing  grain  over  his  stony 
fields,  had  noticed  the  tares  springing  up  with  the  wheat, 
had  marked  the  differences  between  good  land  and  bad. 
He  had  seen  the  labourers  going  up  and  down  with  their 
baskets  between  the  vines.  He  had  listened  to  the 
farmers  who  prophesied  what  weather  was  to  come  from 
the  colour  of  the  clouds.  He  had  watched  the  fox  making 
for  its  earth,  the  snake  gliding  away  into  undergrowth 
murmurous  with  the  buzzing  of  bees,  the  wolf  lurching 
towards  the  mountains,  and  the  hooded  shepherd  carry¬ 
ing  the  lamb  in  his  arms  down  the  hillside.  He  had  also, 
we  may  surely  think,  brought  home  with  him  for  his 
mother,  in  hands  all  dusty  white  from  the  shaping  of 
stones,  little  nosegays  of  wild  flowers  gathered  in  the 
fields — flowers  more  richly  apparelled  in  his  eyes  than 
Solomon  in  all  his  glory. 

If  in  after  life  he  retired  frequently  to  mountains  for 
prayer  and  meditation,  it  is  probable  that  he  learned  this 


62 


SEVEN  AGES 


habit  in  boyhood,  and  often  climbed  to  the  heights  above 
Nazareth,  either  to  think  out  the  problems  of  youth 
or  to  escape  from  the  disturbances  of  a  crowded  home 
and  a  noisy  town.  Certain  is  it  that  he  had  a  feeling  for 
nature  which  never  manifests  itself  in  Greek  literature, 
and  which  is  found  in  later  Roman  literature  only  among 
those  whose  minds  were  not  tormented  by  divine  things. 
No  great  teacher  before  his  time  had  this  beautiful  back¬ 
ground  to  his  life.  One  may  say  that  it  explains,  or  helps 
us  to  understand,  if  not  an  essential  part  of  his  teach¬ 
ing,  at  least  that  wonderful  serenity  of  soul  which  is 
so  striking  a  characteristic  of  his  world-shattering 
career. 

When  he  was  nearly  thirty  years  old,  and  had  taken 
the  place  of  his  dead  father  in  that  little  household  at 
Nazareth,  the  political  life  of  his  fellow-countrymen  was 
brought  to  a  sudden  tension  by  the  appearance  of  a 
prophet. 

The  last  of  the  prophets  had  long  been  dead.  The 
Jew  who  wanted  prophecy  consulted  his  scriptures,  pored 
over  them,  read  into  contemporary  references  hints  of 
a  time  that  was  yet  to  come — a  terrible  desolation  for  his 
enemies,  a  glorious  autocracy  for  him.  Prophecy  had 
become  a  matter  of  literature,  not  of  life.  God  was  no 
longer  speaking  to  His  people.  But  here,  all  of  a  sudden, 
was  a  man  from  the  wilderness,  strangely  garbed,  wild 
living,  and  passionate,  who  was  speaking  to  living  Jews 
as  even  the  dead  prophets  had  never  spoken  to  their  fore- 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS  63 

fathers,  delivering  to  this  present  day  a  message  from 
their  God. 

The  nature  of  that  message  fell  like  a  new  harmony 
into  the  discordances  of  Jewish  life.  It  united  all  the 
parties.  “Repent !”  Every  Jew  acknowledged  that 
God’s  interposition  was  hindered  by  the  sins  of  His 
chosen  people.  “Let  us  prepare  our  souls,”  Baruch  had 
said,  “that  we  may  have  hope,  and  be  not  put  to  shame, 
that  we  may  rest  with  our  fathers,  and  be  not  punished 
with  our  foes.”  And  now  the  time  was  at  hand.  A 
prophet  had  risen  once  more  in  Israel.  “Prepare  ye  the 
way  of  the  Lord.”  Every  Jew  was  expecting  the  divine 
visitation.  Who,  then,  could  object  to  the  sign  which 
this  new  prophet  required  of  those  who  confessed  their 
sins  and  protested  a  desire  for  their  remission?  Crowds 
of  Jews  hurried  to  the  Jordan,  entered  those  sacred 
waters  just  as  Indians  enter  Ganges  in  our  own  day,  and 
were  washed  clean  of  their  sins.  Some  were  mere 
patriots  eager  to  hasten  the  arrival  of  Messiah  and  to  see 
the  impious  Romans  broken  before  all  nations;  but  many 
belonged  to  the  quiet  country  Jews  who  lived  remote 
from  the  centre  of  politics,  and  were  truly  hungering 
after  the  bread  of  righteousness. 

Among  these  last  came  Jesus,  and  was  baptized  by 
John,  and  immediately  retired  into  the  wilderness. 
When  he  next  came  among  his  friends  and  neighbours 
it  was  with  a  message.  The  builder  had  become  a 
prophet.  “The  time  is  fulfilled,”  he  said.  “The  Kingdom 


64  SEVEN  AGES 

of  God  is  at  hand.  Repent,  and  believe  the  good 
news.” 

He  offended  the  priests  of  Nazareth,  and  went  out 
into  the  countryside.  He  drew  a  number  of  young  men 
about  him,  and  together  they  moved  through  Galilee,  tell¬ 
ing  people  that  the  Kingdom  was  at  hand,  the  Kingdom 
of  God  on  earth,  and  that  Messiah  would  reign.  Jesus 
described  his  message  as  good  news.  He  laid  great 
emphasis  on  the  point,  that  his  hearers  must  believe  this 
good  news.  He  spoke  of  himself  as  a  prophet. 

His  mother  and  his  brothers  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  preaching  of  John  had  affected  his  mind.  They 
endeavoured  to  bring  him  home,  to  put  a  stop  to  this 
preaching  which  had  offended  the  dignitaries  of  their 
local  synagogue,  and  was  now  offending  other  syna¬ 
gogues  in  Galilee.  But  Jesus  persisted  in  his  prophecy. 
The  time  was  truly  at  hand. 

It  is  clear  that  he  had  not  entered  upon  this  prophetic 
mission  without  earnest  thought  and  without  an  assur¬ 
ance  that  it  was  the  will  of  God.  During  his  retirement 
in  the  wilderness  he  had  so  deepened  his  consciousness 
of  the  divine  that  it  seemed  to  him  as  if  God  Himself 
was  present  in  his  soul.  He  became  aware  of  unusual 
power.  He  felt  that  he  could  do  extraordinary  things. 
For  a  moment  he  was  almost  carried  away  by  the  sug¬ 
gestion  that  perhaps  these  strange  powers  were  given  to 
him  in  order  that  he  might  free  his  country  from  the 
Roman  yoke  and  establish  the  throne  of  Israel.  But 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


65 


this  idea  he  put  away  from  him.  A  greater  loomed  into 
his  mind.  John  was  right :  the  people  of  Israel  must  re¬ 
pent.  The  Kingdom  of  God  could  come  only  to  hearts 
that  were  cleansed  of  all  sin.  It  would  be  brought  to 
earth  only  by  souls  that  hungered  and  thirsted  after 
righteousness. 

The  greatest  prophets  of  Israel  had  always  sounded 
this  Socratic  note  of  inwardness. 

The  most  authentic  of  our  records  makes  it  quite  plain 
that  in  preaching  to  the  villagers  of  Galilee,  Jesus  exer¬ 
cised  an  unusual  spiritual  power  over  their  minds  and 
bodies.  It  is  as  certain  that  he  cured  some  people  of 
diseases  and  delusions,  as  that  he  failed,  because  of  their 
unbelief,  to  cure  other  people.  It  is  certain  that  beyond 
the  announcement  of  the  coming  Kingdom — it  was  even 
important  that  this  good  news  was  to  be  received  with 
faith — he  laid  a  new  and  unusual  emphasis  on  the  mysti¬ 
cal  power  of  belief.  Indeed,  some  minds  have  come  to 
think  that  the  sole  uniqueness  of  his  teaching,  apart  from 
the  beauty  of  personality  informing  it,  lay  in  its  dis¬ 
closure  to  the  human  race  of  a  power  within  the  soul 
which  by  union  with  God  may  become  the  master  of 
circumstance. 

It  is  most  true  that  he  accepted  the  Jewish  eschatology; 
he  believed  in  the  end  of  one  age,  and  the  beginning  of 
another — a  better  age  in  which  the  will  of  God  would 
be  done  on  earth  as  it  is  in  heaven.  But  those  critics 


66 


SEVEN  AGES 


who  insist  upon  this  mistaken  belief,  and  who  become  so 
obsessed  by  it  as  an  explanation  of  the  tragedy  which 
was  so  soon  to  end  in  the  hateful  city  of  Jerusalem  the 
beautiful  idyll  of  Galilee,  overlook,  I  think,  the  extreme 
importance  of  the  Master’s  preaching  of  inwardness.  If 
he  said,  “The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  at  hand,”  also  he 
said,  “The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  within  you.”  If  he 
announced  the  coming  of  desolation,  he  also  revealed  the 
extraordinary  power  of  prayer,  and  exalted  the  exquisite 
emotion  of  love.  On  no  just  reading  of  the  documents, 
with  all  their  difficulties  and  contradictions,  can  the  figure 
of  Jesus  be  shown  as  a  fanatic,  or  even  as  an  enthusiast. 
There  is  always  apparent  in  the  Galilean  a  serenity  higher 
even  than  that  of  Socrates,  a  tranquillity  which  is  as  com¬ 
pelling  in  Mark  as  it  is  in  John,  a  restfulness  as  real  in 
Matthew  as  it  is  in  Luke. 

All  the  documents  which  have  employed  the  scholarship 
of  Europe  for  so  many  centuries  must  be  torn  up,  the 
authentic  as  well  as  the  faulty  or  the  forged,  before  the 
historic  Jesus  can  be  made  to  appear  in  the  imagination 
of  men  as  a  person  of  unstable  mind  carried  away  by  the 
delusion  of  an  approaching  world  catastrophe. 

It  is  in  Mark  that  we  read:  “And  he  took  a  child, 
and  set  him  in  the  midst  of  them :  and  when  he  had  taken 
him  in  his  arms,  he  said  unto  them,  Whosoever  shall 
receive  one  of  such  children  in  my  name,  receiveth  me: 
and  whosoever  shall  receive  me,  receiveth  not  me,  but  him 
that  sent  me.  .  .  .  Suffer  the  little  children  to  come  unto 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


67 


me,  and  forbid  them  not :  for  of  such  is  the  Kingdom  of 
God.  Verily  I  say  unto  you,  Whosoever  shall  not  receive 
the  Kingdom  of  God  as  a  little  child,  he  shall  not  enter 
therein.” 

It  is  in  Mark,  too,  that  we  read  three  great  tolerant 
and  unfrenzied  sayings :  “The  sabbath  was  made  for 
man,  and  not  man  for  the  sabbath”;  and  “Render  to 
Caesar  the  things  that  are  Caesar’s,  and  to  God  the  things 
that  are  God’s”;  and  “He  that  is  not  against  us  is  on 
our  part” 

Further  it  is  in  Mark  that  we  have  the  dialogue 
with  the  scribe  as  to  which  is  the  first  commandment 
of  all : 

“And  the  scribe  said  unto  him,  Well,  Master,  thou 
hast  said  the  truth:  for  there  is  one  God;  and  there  is 
none  other  but  he :  and  to  love  him  with  all  the  heart, 
and  with  all  the  understanding,  and  with  all  the  soul, 
and  with  all  the  strength,  and  to  love  his  neighbour  as 
himself,  is  more  than  all  whole  burnt  offerings  and  sacri¬ 
fices.  And  when  Jesus  saw  that  he  answered  discreetly, 
he  said  unto  him,  Thou  art  not  far  from  the  Kingdom 
of  God.” 

These  utterances,  occurring  in  the  record  most  per¬ 
vaded  by  the  idea  of  a  world  catastrophe,  make  it  im¬ 
possible  to  think  of  Jesus  as  a  fanatic,  and  make  it 
difficult  indeed  to  conceive  of  him  except  as  a  calm  and 
gracious  spirit  inspired  by  the  profoundest  quietism.  The 
whole  record  of  Mark,  indeed,  is  the  story  of  a  new 


68 


SEVEN  AGES 


spiritual  power  in  human  life,  manifesting  itself  with  the 
quietness  of  a  faith  so  deep  that  it  seems  to  us  like  know¬ 
ledge.  Jesus,  we  may  say,  uttered  his  warning  of  the 
world's  approaching  end — refusing  always  to  predict  its 
date — in  a  tone  of  such  compelling  love  that  it  rather 
breaks  down  the  heart  of  the  strongest  than  raises  a 
tremor  in  the  mind  of  the  most  timorous. 

That  his  chief  insistence  was  on  the  need  of  an  inward 
and  spiritual  change  in  man,  may  be  seen  clearly  and 
conclusively  in  all  his  controversies  with  the  Pharisees. 
He  opposed  himself  to  these  guardians  of  the  sacred 
Law,  not  that  he  wished  to  set  that  Law  aside,  but  because 
their  interpretations  of  it  made  for  an  unimaginative 
formalism  fatal  to  any  real  hunger  and  thirst  after 
righteousness,  to  any  vital  progress  in  spiritual  life.  The 
washing  of  pots  and  cups  and  brazen  vessels,  indeed  the 
whole  ritual  of  the  altar,  moved  him  to  contempt.  “There 
is  nothing  from  without  a  man,  that  entering  into  him 
can  defile  him :  but  the  things  which  come  out  of  him, 
those  are  they  that  defile  the  man.  If  any  man  hath  ears 
to  hear,  let  him  hear.”  It  was  a  revolution  he  was  an¬ 
nouncing.  The  soul  of  man  was  to  deal  direct  with  God. 
That  soul  was  to  be  unafraid.  It  was  to  be  childlike 
in  its  attitude,  as  a  child  with  its  father.  But  it  was 
to  be  searchingly  honest  with  itself.  It  was  to  search 
for  its  own  faults  rather  than  to  observe  the  sins  of 
others. 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


69 


He  simplified  the  whole  Law,  reducing  all  the  minutiae 
of  its  multitudinous  enactments  to  the  first  and  greatest 
of  all  the  commandments,  love  of  God;  but  he  made  that 
love  something  so  tremendous  and  real  that  it  became  a 
power  of  infinite  and  unimaginable  competence.  “If 
thou  canst  believe,”  we  read  in  Mark,  “all  things  are  pos¬ 
sible  to  him  that  believeth”;  and  again  in  Mark,  “Have 
faith  in  God.  For  verily  I  say  unto  you,  That  whoso¬ 
ever  shall  say  unto  this  mountain,  Be  removed,  and  be 
thou  cast  in  the  sea,  and  shall  not  doubt  it  in  his  heart, 
but  shall  believe  that  those  things  which  he  saith  shall 
come  to  pass,  he  shall  have  whatsoever  he  saith.  There¬ 
fore  I  say  unto  you,  What  things  soever  ye  desire,  when 
ye  pray,  believe  that  ye  receive  them,  and  ye  shall  have 
them.” 

If  these  utterances  are  found  in  the  eschatological 
gospel  of  Mark,  the  earliest  and  least  corrupted  of  all 
the  gospels,  who  can  doubt,  first,  the  profound  serenity 
of  the  Galilean’s  soul,  and,  second,  that  the  source  both 
of  his  attraction  and  of  his  power  was  an  inward  and 
spiritual  life  without  parallel  in  the  records  of  human 
personality?  Moreover,  how  are  we  to  account  for  the 
early  hostility  of  the  priests  to  the  message  of  Jesus — 
remembering  that  he  never  once  publicly  announced  him¬ 
self  as  the  Messiah — if  we  leave  out  of  our  consideration 
the  surely  most  striking  fact  that  he  preached  repentance 
not  to  the  religious,  but  to  the  outcasts  of  society?  And 
if  he  did  that,  how  is  it  possible  to  think  of  him  as  a 


7  o 


SEVEN  AGES 


deluded  man  crazed  by  the  idea  of  an  approaching  cata¬ 
clysm?  When  the  skies  are  about  to  fall  the  condition 
of  a  beggar’s  soul  would  hardly  catch  the  attention  of  an 
excitable  preacher. 

Do  not  let  the  reader  suppose  for  a  moment  that  I 
wish  to  abridge  in  any  degree  whatever  those  passages 
in  the  primitive  gospel  which  attest  the  conviction  of 
Jesus  that  the  end  of  an  age  was  at  hand  and  that  the 
birth  of  the  Kingdom  would  be  attended  by  dreadful 
horror.  My  purpose  in  dwelling  on  the  serenity  of  the 
Master,  the  serenity  of  the  historical  Jesus,  is  to  bring 
this  undoubted  fact  of  his  teaching  into  its  proper  place 
in  his  life,  not  to  overwhelm  the  soul  of  the  man  with 
one  of  his  ideas.  Like  almost  all  the  Jews  of  that  time, 
Jesus  carried  in  his  mind  a  sense  of  approaching  doom; 
like  Baruch  he  felt  that  the  youth  of  the  world  was  past 
and  the  strength  of  creation  exhausted,  that  the  ship  was 
nigh  unto  the  harbour,  that  the  pilgrim  was  reaching  the 
city,  and  that  life  was  close  unto  its  end;  and  there  were 
moments  when  this  conviction  overpowered  him;  but  re¬ 
garded  as  a  whole,  his  life  was  one  of  singular  peace  and 
gentleness,  characterised  by  a  tranquillity  which  is  hardly 
to  be  matched  in  the  history  of  religion,  and  inspired  by 
a  feeling  of  relationship  to  the  divine  which  is  not  to  be 
found  in  the  history  of  the  whole  world.  Let  us  re¬ 
member,  when  we  think  of  his  illusion,  that  he  disap¬ 
pointed  the  hopes  of  John  the  Baptist  and  sought  the 
unhappy  among  the  lowest  of  the  people. 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


7i 


The  preaching  of  Jesus  attracted  great  attention  in 
Galilee,  and  created  enemies  for  him  among  the  Pharisees 
and  Zealots,  but  it  did  not  bring  him  within  reach  of 
the  law.  It  was  only  when  he  arrived  in  Jerusalem  for 
the  first  time  that  he  committed  an  act  which  was  fatal 
to  his  mission. 

Up  to  that  moment  the  brief  career  of  Jesus,  almost 
a  haunted  career,  had  been  marked  by  occasional  mani¬ 
festations  of  popular  favour  and  an  unalterable,  an 
implacable  official  disapproval.  He  wandered  with  his 
disciples  through  the  fields  and  villages,  without  a  home 
and  without  any  sense  of  security,  hunted  out  of  this 
place,  ridiculed  in  that,  and  heard  gratefully  here  and 
there  only  by  the  outcasts  and  a  few  enlightened  people 
who  came  to  him  with  the  furtiveness  of  shame.  The 
Pharisees  hated  him  as  a  renegade,  and  the  Zealots  as  a 
pacifist.  It  was  only  among  the  simplest  of  the  people 
that  his  miracles  created  astonishment,  and  only  in  the 
hearts  of  the  humblest  and  the  saddest  that  his  words 
found  a  refuge  from  the  turmoil  of  controversy.  Even 
his  disciples  were  doubtful  of  him — doubtful  as  to  his 
mission  and  doubtful  as  to  his  message,  which  only  a 
few  of  them  understood.  His  life  was  one  of  abiding 
solitude  of  soul.  The  only  companion  of  his  spirit  was 
the  voice  from  heaven.  Whenever  he  was  overtaken  by 
an  extreme  of  sorrow  or  halted  by  a  doubt  as  to  what  he 
should  do  next,  he  left  his  disciples  and  retired  into  the 
hills  for  prayer. 


72 


SEVEN  AGES 


Before  we  approach  the  tragic  end  of  this  beautiful 
life,  let  us  be  certain  that  we  understand  the  soul  of 
its  teaching.  Jesus,  we  must  remind  ourselves,  had  never 
used,  and  had  never  heard,  the  Greek  name  of  Christ. 
When  he  spoke  of  himself  he  used  the  term  Son  of  Man. 
He  never  made  any  claim  to  a  unique  birth,  and  never 
encouraged  his  disciples  to  regard  him  as  anything  but 
human.  Like  all  Jews,  the  centre  of  his  faith  was  the 
supremacy  of  one  righteous  God.  To  suppose  that  the 
coming  of  Messiah  was  God  Himself,  or  a  mysterious 
division  of  God,  never  entered  his  mind;  if  it  had,  it 
would  have  been  driven  forth  as  a  blasphemy.  The 
Messiah  was  to  come  from  God,  and  was  to  be  a  super¬ 
natural  person,  but  he  was  not  to  be  like  any  of  the 
strange  creatures  which  figure  in  the  religions  of  the 
heathen;  he  was  to  be  in  the  likeness  of  man — bar  nasha 
— a  Son  of  Man.1 

This  was  the  undoubted  faith  of  Jesus.  Towards  the 
end  of  his  career,  when  his  disciples  were  attacked  by 
doubt,  and  were  growing  weary  of  their  long  wander¬ 
ing  from  village  to  village,  Jesus  suggested  to  them  that 


1  In  Aramaic  “Son  of  Man”  signifies  simply  a  human  being,  and 
has  no  mystical  significance  as  it  has  in  Greek  or  English.  Dr. 
Kirsopp  Lake  thinks  it  probable  that  the  phrase  in  the  earlier  chapters 
of  Mark  is  a  misunderstanding  for  “a  human  being.”  He  points 
out  that  on  any  other  assumption  the  “therefore”  is  meaningless  in 
the  sabbath  incident:  “Therefore  the  Son  of  Man  is  lord  also  of 
the  sabbath.”  Clearly  the  text  should  read :  “The  sabbath  was 
made  for  man,  not  man  for  the  sabbath;  therefore  man  is  lord 
also  of  the  sabbath.” 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


73 


perhaps  the  Messiah  might  come  not  only  in  the  likeness 
of  man,  but  as  a  man,  that  perhaps  God  might  even 
accept  him,  Jesus,  because  of  his  great  faith,  because  of 
his  spiritual  teaching,  as  the  Messiah  who  was  to  make 
the  will  of  God  done  on  earth  even  as  it  is  in  heaven. 
If  more  was  said,  it  was  said  in  secret,  and  certainly 
conveyed  to  the  mind  of  most  of  the  disciples  that  Jesus 
himself  was  uncertain  about  it. 

Further  we  must  remind  ourselves  that  Jesus  had  no 
dramatic  promise  to  make  to  those  who  shared  his  home¬ 
less  wanderings.  His  teaching,  indeed,  although  ex¬ 
pressed  in  the  simplest  words,  made  the  sternest  of  de¬ 
mands  on  human  nature.  The  love  of  God  is  a  phrase 
which  comes  easily  to  the  lips ;  but  how  hardly  does  that 
love  enter  the  heart  of  man.  Sin  is  not  difficult  to  resist 
when  a  man  has  mastered  the  animal ;  but  who  can  banish 
every  thought  of  sin  from  his  soul?  Repentance  is 
natural;  but  who  can  say  from  his  heart  that  he  would 
rather  maim  himself  than  do  that  sin  again?  Aspiration 
is  common  to  every  son  of  man  who  has  not  strangled 
his  conscience;  but  how  many  hunger  and  thirst  after 
righteousness?  In  all  his  teaching,  Jesus  made  this 
transforming  demand  on  those  who  heard  him.  He  had 
no  thrones  in  the  age  which  was  to  come  for  those  who 
shared  his  sufferings  and  his  confidence;  only  the  in¬ 
junction,  Be  ye  perfect,  even  as  your  Father  in  Heaven 
is  perfect. 

If  he  held  the  idea  of  an  approaching  end  to  the  world, 


7  4 


SEVEN  AGES 


he  held  it  lightly  in  comparison  with  his  greater  idea, 
which  did  indeed  overmaster  him — the  idea  of  the  soul’s 
direct  relationship  with  God  and  the  absolute  need  of 
truth  in  the  inward  parts.  He  was  much  more  a  preacher 
of  righteousness  than  a  prophet  of  calamity.  More¬ 
over,  he  was  much  more  a  rational  teacher  of  righteous¬ 
ness  than  a  preacher  of  emotion;  he  told  men  that  what 
they  sow  that  also  must  they  reap,  and  that  there  is  a  law 
in  the  spiritual  world  as  inexorable  as  any  law  of  nature. 
Certainly  until  he  set  his  face  towards  Jerusalem,  the 
ceaseless  effort  of  his  beneficent  nature  was  to  turn  the 
hearts  of  his  countrymen  away  from  the  deceits  of  ma¬ 
terialism  and  to  give  them  the  new  life  of  an  inward 
and  spiritual  perfection.  It  was  as  a  prophet  that  he 
set  out  to  preach;  it  was  as  a  prophet  that  he  found  no 
honour  in  his  own  country;  it  was  as  a  prophet  that  he 
went  up  to  Jerusalem. 

Few  moments  in  history  are  more  moving  than  those 
which  witnessed  the  arrival  in  the  sacred  Jewish  capital, 
the  seat  of  the  aristocratic  priesthood,  of  this  Galilean 
preacher  with  his  humble  and  sceptical  followers,  and  a 
small  crowd  of  excited  people  from  the  lowest  orders 
shouting  that  a  prophet  had  come  to  Jerusalem.  The 
provincial  disciples  were  overwhelmed  by  the  city’s  im¬ 
pressive  magnificence,  and  Jesus  had  to  reassure  them 
with  the  claim  that  if  all  those  crowding  synagogues 
were  overthrown  he  could  raise  them  up  again  by  a  word. 
Then  they  approached  the  temple,  the  chief  glory  of  their 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


75 


nation,  a  wonder  of  the  world.  To  the  disciples  this 
must  have  been  the  severest  test  of  their  faith  in  Jesus, 
perhaps  the  test  under  which  Judas  broke  down.  How 
could  Jesus  hope  to  oppose  himself  to  so  magnificent  a 
power  as  was  symbolised  by  this  mighty  temple  of  white 
marble  and  shining  gold,  with  its  Corinthian  pillars,  its 
great  cloisters,  its  wide  courts  seething  with  people,  its 
noble  stairs  leading  up  to  lofty  porticoes  and  the  great 
porch  with  its  golden  vine?  How  could  their  leader, 
dusty  and  tired  from  his  journey,  hope  to  overthrow  the 
historic  priesthood  of  Israel? 

But  Jesus  saw  what  the  disciples  did  not  see.  He 
saw  the  tables  of  the  money-changers,  saw  the  poor  peo¬ 
ple  humbly  changing  their  Roman  coins  into  Jewish 
money,  and  knew  that  the  priests  ordered  this  traffic  that 
they  might  make  a  profit  on  the  transaction.  He  saw 
the  people  buying  doves  for  the  sacrifice,  lest  the  priests 
should  pronounce  their  own  offerings  to  be  blemished, 
and  knew  that  the  sellers  of  those  doves  paid  a  commis¬ 
sion  to  the  priests.  His  serenity  deserted  him.  Here  was 
the  very  thing  he  had  come  out  to  destroy.  He 
threw  himself  into  the  midst  of  this  sordid  bartering, 
overturned  the  tables  of  the  money-changers,  drove 
away  those  that  bought  and  sold,  and  pronounced 
Israel’s  sacred  house  of  prayer  to  be  a  den  of 
thieves. 

This  act  of  righteous  indignation  sealed  his  doom.  He 
might  have  preached  the  coming  of  the  Kingdom  in 


;6 


SEVEN  AGES 


every  synagogue  crowding  the  narrow  streets  of  Jerusa¬ 
lem  without  incurring  the  murderous  wrath  of  the 
priests ;  but  to  declare  in  the  sacred  temple,  the  head¬ 
quarters  of  the  priesthood,  that  these  aristocratic  priests 
were  a  set  of  thieves,  this,  because  it  was  true,  this,  be¬ 
cause  it  threatened  their  financial  security,  this,  because 
it  struck  the  most  deadly  blow  at  their  vested  interests, 
was  the  challenge  that  led  to  the  cross. 

To  arrest  Jesus  without  being  certain  that  they  could 
secure  his  execution  would  have  been  disastrous.  A  man 
so  determined  and  so  courageous  would  of  a  surety  re¬ 
turn  to  the  charge,  not  with  twelve  frightened  country¬ 
men  from  the  north  at  his  heels,  but  perhaps  with  the 
rabble  of  the  city,  the  pariahs  whom  Pharisee  and  Sad- 
ducee  excluded  from  Israel’s  religion.  The  city,  whose 
normal  population  was  50,000,  now  housed  perhaps  a 
million  people,  for  it  was  the  great  feast  of  the  Passover. 
The  priests,  therefore,  afraid  of  a  riot,  conspired  against 
him  in  a  manner  which  is  still  common  in  the  East.  There 
was  the  rumour  of  a  reward  for  evidence  which  would 
lead  to  the  arrest  of  this  noisy  fellow  from  Galilee,  and 
secret  inquiries  made  as  to  his  mission  among  those  who 
followed  him,  probably  intimidating  inquiries :  “You  had 
better  look  out  for  yourself,  the  priests  know  something 
about  this  Jesus;  if  they  decide  to  arrest  him,  you  may 
be  arrested  too.” 

Judas  decided  to  betray  him.  Perhaps  he  had  lost 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


77 


faith  in  Jesus,  perhaps  he  was  only  a  coward  thinking 
of  his  own  safety.  In  any  case  he  gave  the  priests  the 
information  that  they  needed,  startling  information,  in¬ 
formation  almost  too  good  to  be  true.  Jesus,  it  appeared, 
was  not  only  a  militant  Essene  or  a  socialistic  prophet; 
he  had  confided  to  his  disciples  the  secret  belief  of  his 
soul  that  when  the  new  age  came,  God  might  choose  him 
to  be  the  Messiah. 

This  was  such  patent  blasphemy  that  the  priests  hesi¬ 
tated  no  longer.  Even  the  rabble  would  howl  at  him 
when  this  was  known.  Jesus  was  arrested,  tried  on  the 
charge  of  blasphemy,  and  hurried  to  his  death.  In  the 
incident  of  the  Prsetorium,  reported  by  the  faithful 
Mark,  we  may  see  how  effective  the  disclosure  of  Judas 
had  been.  The  Roman  soldiers  clothed  his  body,  still 
quivering  and  bloody  from  the  scourge,  with  a  purple 
robe,  and  made  of  thorns  a  mock  royal  crown  and  pressed 
it  over  his  head,  and  bowed  their  knees  before  him,  say¬ 
ing,  “Hail,  King  of  the  Jews!”  Afterwards  they  smote 
him,  and  spat  upon  him,  and  took  off  the  purple  robe, 
and  put  on  his  own  garments,  and  led  him,  so  weak  that 
he  could  not  carry  the  cross,  to  Golgotha,  the  place  of 
execution.  And  there,  his  disciples  having  fled  back  to 
Galilee,  he  was  crucified  with  a  jest  of  the  Roman  pro¬ 
curator  hanging  above  his  head — THE  KING  OF  THE 
JEWS. 

“And  at  the  ninth  hour,”  we  read  in  the  primitive 
record,  “Jesus  cried  with  a  loud  voice,  Eloi,  Eloi,  lama 


7^ 


SEVEN  AGES 


sabachthani?  which  is,  being  interpreted,  My  God,  my 
God,  why  hast  thou  forsaken  me?” 

Thus  ended  a  life  destined  to  change  the  history  of 
mankind  more  deeply,  more  widely,  and  more  per¬ 
manently  than  any  other  from  the  beginning  of  time 
until  this  present  hour. 

Brief  as  our  summary  of  that  career  has  been,  I  do 
not  think  there  is  one  reputable  scholar  who  will  seriously 
dispute  its  substantial  accuracy.1 

The  life  of  Jesus  was  the  life  of  a  prophet  profoundly 
aware  of,  profoundly  moved  by,  the  unhappiness  of 
humanity,  and  profoundly  convinced  of  a  divine  mission. 
That  he  erred  as  a  man  is  as  clear  to  us  as  the  fact  of  his 
death.  That  he  did  not  realise  the  manner  in  which  his 
life  would  be  fulfilled  is  as  certain  as  the  fact 
that  his  disciples  deserted  him.  But  truly  it  may  be  said 
that  if  the  life  of  Socrates  was  a  life  of  inspiration,  and 
the  life  of  Aristotle  was  a  life  of  observation,  the  life  of 
Jesus  was  supremely  a  life  of  revelation. 

From  him,  as  from  no  other  teacher  in  the  world’s 
history,  men  have  gathered  an  idea  of  God  which  has 
proved  itself  to  be  the  greatest  force  in  the  only  civilisa- 

1 1  am  reminded  that  as  late  as  1904  a  Pope  of  Rome  issued  an 
encyclical  in  which  he  announced  that  “the  Hebrew  patriarchs  were 
familiar  with  the  doctrine  of  the  Immaculate  Conception,  and  found 
consolation  in  the  thought  of  Mary  in  the  solemn  moments  of  their 
life.”  Such  is  the  incredible  power  of  self-deception  in  minds  which 
are  honest  but  irrational.  When  I  speak  of  reputable  scholars  I 
mean  competent  judges  whose  devotion  to  truth  may  justly  be 
compared  with  even  the  same  spirit  in  the  man  of  science. 


THE  AGE  OF  JESUS 


79 


tion  which  endures  the  changes  of  time  and  survives  the 
vicissitudes  of  life,  the  civilisation  of  the  human  soul. 
And  in  him,  as  in  no  other  man,  humanity  has  found 
an  ideal  of  character  before  which  the  noblest  of  the  sons 
of  men  in  all  generations  since  his  day  have  bowed  their 
heads.  All  the  crimes  of  history  committed  in  his  name, 
all  the  superstitions  of  paganism  which  have  flocked  to 
his  worship  for  final  sanctuary  from  the  advancing 
nemesis  of  science,  cannot  obscure  the  beauty  of  his  life 
nor  darken  the  radiance  of  his  revelation. 

If  there  is  a  God  who  cares  for  the  fortunes  of  this 
planet  and  is  mindful  of  His  creature  man,  then  we  must 
say  that  no  historic  person  has  ever  shown  Him  to 
humanity  with  a  more  lovely  reasonableness  and  a  more 
authentic  assurance  than  the  Galilean  whose  name  of 
Jesus  stands  for  God’s  Helper.  And  by  showing  Him  to 
humanity  in  so  compelling  a  manner,  a  manner  which 
has  attracted  the  greatest  of  men  as  well  as  the  lowliest, 
Jesus  gave  to  the  world  an  authority  in  the  sphere  of 
morals  which  is  higher  than  any  sanction  of  philosophy 
or  politics,  and  the  only  authority  except  the  policeman 
which  can  keep  the  forces  of  anarchy  at  bay. 

There  is  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus  a  simplicity  greater 
than  that  of  Socrates,  and  yet  a  profundity  that  goes 
deeper  than  that  of  Plato.  He  seems  most  perfectly  to 
have  mastered  the  realisation  of  the  Psalmist  that  the 
statutes  of  God  give  wisdom  unto  the  simple — the  highest 


8o 


SEVEN  AGES 


conceivable  wisdom  to  the  humblest  of  minds.  His  para¬ 
bles  are  as  exquisite  and  unlaboured  in  phrasing  as  any¬ 
thing  in  the  literature  of  the  world;  and  they  wake  the 
same  spiritual  response  in  the  mind  of  a  peasant  as  they 
do  in  the  mind  of  a  scholar.  No  one  in  the  history  of 
man  has  made  so  triumphantly  as  Jesus  that  appeal  to  the 
human  heart  which  liberates  life  from  the  domination 
and  deceits  of  environment,  and  bestows  upon  it  the  in¬ 
creasing  consciousness  of  the  immortality  of  spiritual 
values. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 
(354-430) 


8j 


\ 


CHAPTER  IV 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 
(354-430) 

A  noble  simplicity  of  character  distinguished  the 
Roman  from  other  people.  Less  imaginative  than  the 
Greek,  he  was  more  practical;  less  curious  or  inquiring, 
he  was  more  stable.  The  Greek  had  no  feeling  for  na¬ 
ture;  the  Roman  found  not  only  happiness  but  occasions 
for  art  in  the  business  of  garden  and  orchard,  farm  and 
vineyard. 

Greek  mythology  suggests  to  the  modern  reader  a 
scandalous  chronicle  of  fashionable  society;  Roman 
mythology,  on  the  other  hand,  is  an  apotheosis  of  the 
middle  classes.  The  one  might  have  been  the  creation 
of  Horace  Walpole;  the  other  of  Jane  Austen. 

This  simplicity  of  character  enabled  the  Roman  to 
arrive  at  a  unifying  principle  for  his  politics.  He  be¬ 
lieved  in  aristocracy.  No  theorist  preaching  equality  of 
men  could  have  found  a  hearing  in  Rome  during  the 
greatest  days  of  the  Republic  and  the  Empire.  Men 

83 


84 


SEVEN  AGES 


were  not  equal  in  physical  strength  or  in  mental  power. 
There  was  a  best  among  men  as  there  was  among  cattle. 
It  was  an  obvious  advantage  to  the  state  that  the  best 
should  rule. 

Because  of  this  simple  and  practical  faith  in  aristo¬ 
cracy,  Rome  advanced  with  small  difficulty,  over  the 
chaos  of  a  world  without  fixed  principles,  to  a  dominion 
as  beneficent  as  it  was  glorious.  In  the  Senate,  rather 
than  in  the  Emperor,  lay  the  secret  of  her  disciplined 
legions  and  the  unity  of  her  state.  Those  admirable 
senators,  whose  sole  occupation  was  the  care  of  the 
Roman  world,  exercised  power  in  an  atmosphere  of 
unquestioned  loyalty.  They  provided  the  Roman  people 
not  only  with  just  laws,  but  with  ideals.  To  live  simply 
and  strongly,  to  speak  truth  and  to  act  with  honesty,  to  be 
fearless  and  calm,  patriotic  and  obedient,  this  was  to  be 
a  Roman. 

Thus  it  came  about  that  while  the  Roman  legions 
pushed  their  conquests  farther  and  farther  afield,  the 
Roman  ideal  of  human  character  began  to  spread  itself 
through  the  world.  In  countries  where  she  made  her 
firm  roads,  built  her  great  bridges,  carried  her  vast  aque¬ 
ducts  over  desolate  plains  into  the  midst  of  crowded  cities, 
laying  everywhere  the  foundations  of  a  world  order 
which  was  manifestly  to  the  advantage  of  trade  and 
peace,  there  too  in  her  representative  she  set  up  this  new 
ideal  of  human  character — a  man  who  did  justice  fear^ 
lessly,  who  lived  without  Asiatic  pomp,  who  was  accessi- 


ST.  AUGUSTINE 

From  the  painting  by  Pietro  Gandido 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


85 


ble  and  trustworthy,  and  who  was  a  true  master  because 
he  was  an  honourable  servant. 

So  long  as  these  men  lived  Rome  was  unconquerable. 
The  legions  looked  up  to  them,  the  citizens  looked  up 
to  them,  the  aliens  looked  up  to  them ;  and  the  Emperor, 
whose  election  the  Senate  alone  could  ratify,  also  looked 
up  to  these  Roman  nobles,  these  guardians  of  the  Law, 
as  the  highest  authority  in  the  state. 

Unhappily  for  the  peace  of  the  world  and  the  ad¬ 
vancement  of  moral  ideas,  this  greatest  of  all  political 
experiments  in  the  ancient  world  came  to  destruction 
in  the  fifth  century  of  the  present  era.  The  causes  of 
that  vast  disintegration,  thanks  to  the  labours  of 
innumerable  historians  in  all  the  nations  of  mankind, 
may  be  summarised  in  a  few  words.  First  and  fore¬ 
most,  there  was  a  deficiency  in  the  number  of  patricians 
for  an  empire  of  so  great  a  size.  The  old,  upright,  fear¬ 
less,  and  frugal  order  had  to  recruit  its  ranks  from  those 
whom  we  should  now  call  the  new  rich — men  who  had  no 
traditional  sense  of  responsibility,  whose  lives  had  been 
spent  in  self-advancement  rather  than  in  unselfish  ad¬ 
ministration  of  just  law,  men  to  whom  ostentation  was 
a  finer  thing  than  simplicity,  and  wealth  a  greater  pos¬ 
session  than  culture.  These  men,  making  a  breach  in  the 
walls  of  Roman  character,  enabled  the  barbarians  to  pour 
in  a  stream  of  ideas  fatal  to  political  strength,  fatal  to 
intellectual  evolution,  fatal  to  moral  progress. 

Superstition  in  its  crudest  and  basest  form  invaded 


86 


SEVEN  AGES 


Roman  character,  driving  out  not  only  the  noble 
Stoicism  which  had  been  adopted  from  the  Greeks,  but 
the  original  simplicity  of  the  Roman  mind.  From  Egypt, 
where  “it  was  less  difficult  to  meet  a  god  than  a  man,” 
and  from  demoralised  Greece,  where  the  orgiastic  wor¬ 
ship  of  Bacchus  and  Dionysus  had  been  condemned  by 
intelligent  people  six  and  seven  hundred  years  before, 
and  even  from  the  desert  wastes  of  Arabia  where  the 
priest  and  his  dancing  boys  could  throw  unlettered 
savages  into  frenzied  convulsions  not  unlike  epilepsy,  in¬ 
deed  from  every  part  of  the  empire  where  magic  still 
survived  the  criticism  of  Greek  intellect  and  the  con¬ 
tempt  of  the  old  Roman  common  sense,  superstition  in¬ 
vaded  Rome  and  preyed  on  the  soul  of  that  mighty 
empire  like  a  leprosy. 

The  decay  of  a  virtuous  and  intelligent  aristocracy 
destroyed  the  unifying  principle  of  Roman  politics.  The 
Senate  became  contemptible.  Individual  adventurers, 
finding  themselves  no  longer  opposed  by  an  impregnable 
authority  at  the  head  of  the  state,  pursued  the  road  of  sel¬ 
fish  ambitions,  and  sought  by  conspiracy  and  violence  to 
reach  a  throne  of  autocracy.  Dicipline  deserted  the 
legions.  Soldiers  came  forward  as  emperors.  Civil  war 
made  its  appearance.  Murder,  assassination,  and  revolu¬ 
tion  dominated  the  politics  of  an  empire  visibly  dying  for 
want  of  moral  energy,  for  want  of  a  directing  authority 
strong  in  the  reverence  and  loyalty  of  a  contented  people. 

Emperors  arrived  who  spurned  the  Senate  and  sought 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


87 


to  find  a  unifying  principle  in  the  Asiastic  idea  of  the 
divine  right  of  kings.  They  called  themselves  gods; 
they  wore  crowns  which  shone  with  the  light  of  precious 
stones;  their  breasts  and  their  shoes  blazed  like  the  sun 
which  they  worshipped  as  the  symbol  of  the  supreme 
Jupiter;  they  shut  themselves  up  in  palaces  and  sur¬ 
rounded  themselves  with  a  mystery  never  before  prac¬ 
tised  by  the  greatest  of  their  predecessors;  in  their 
presence  men  prostrated  themselves  on  the  ground,  and  in 
the  temples  they  were  worshipped  with  awful  rites 
evolved  from  the  long  history  of  paganism  and  idolatry. 

They  sought  in  another  way  to  secure  the  fabric  of 
Roman  power.  They  dismembered  the  empire,  and  cre¬ 
ated  more  Augusti  and  more  Caesars  to  rule  over  the 
several  fragments.  They  multiplied  the  number  of 
officials.  They  debased  the  coinage.  They  admitted  bar¬ 
barians  into  the  army.  They  imported  an  Oriental  vul¬ 
garity  into  art  and  sought  in  megalomania  for  the 
principles  of  an  architecture  which  would  make  the  capi¬ 
tal  city  the  crowning  wonder  and  the  inspiring  terror  of 
the  world.  Further,  they  sought  to  secure  loyalty  at  the 
centre  of  the  empire  by  diminishing  the  average  Roman’s 
manful  sense  of  responsibility  and  encouraging  in  him 
a  fatal  sense  of  parasitical  dependence. 

Here  and  there  an  effort  was  made  to  revive  the 
culture  of  the  old  Greco-Roman  civilisation.  Schools 
were  set  up,  professors  were  patronised,  learning  became 
a  fashion,  and  in  Alexandria  at  least  knowledge  was 


88 


SEVEN  AGES 


regarded  as  the  true  end  of  a  man’s  life.  But  these 
efforts  were  in  vain.  Rome  had  surrendered  to  Asia, 
and  Europe  was  left  to  barbarians.  The  aristocracy  had 
gone  down,  taking  law,  discipline,  and  simplicity  along 
with  it;  and  in  the  midst  of  the  anarchy  which  broke 
out  on  that  tragic  fall  of  the  national  will,  an  anarchy 
which  vulgarised  art  and  corrupted  the  domestic  virtues, 
a  new  ferment  began  to  work,  destined  to  nullify  all  the 
patchwork  efforts  of  men  like  Claudius  and  Diocletian 
to  save  the  Empire  from  destruction. 

This  new  ferment  was  the  religion  which  we  now 
know  by  the  name  of  Christianity.  Soon  after  the  death 
of  Jesus,  his  followers,  who  had  fled  back  to  Galilee, 
heard  rumours  that  his  spirit  had  been  seen  in  Jerusa¬ 
lem.  They  were  told  to  wait  in  Galilee  till  he  appeared 
to  them.  When  they  did  return  to  the  capital  city  it  was 
as  men  who  had  seen  a  vision  and  received  an  irresistible 
command. 

They  established  themselves  quietly  in  Jerusalem,  faith¬ 
fully  fulfilling  their  religious  duties  as  Jews,  attending 
for  worship  in  the  synagogues,  and  outwardly  differing 
from  their  fellow-countrymen  only  in  a  form  of  com¬ 
munism  which  ordered  their  private  lives.  They  were 
expecting  the  end  of  the  world  and  the  reappearance  of 
Jesus  as  the  King  of  a  new  world.  In  their  opinion, 
which  is  so  often  misrepresented  even  by  responsible 
writers,  Jesus  had  not  legislated  for  a  world  on  its 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


89 


death-bed:  he  had  prescribed  only  for  its  peace  of  mind. 
He  had  sought  to  free  its  last  moments  from  an  anxiety 
which,  because  those  moments  were  its  last,  was  clearly 
irrational.  Therefore  these  disciples  had  all  things  in 
common,  and  waited  for  the  coming  of  Jesus  with  minds 
entirely  detached  from  the  business  of  human  life.  They 
wrote  no  books.  They  made  no  records  of  the  Galilean 
ministry.  The  end  was  at  hand. 

For  some  time  they  were  regarded  by  the  priests  with 
contempt.  They  were  treated  by  authority  as  harmless 
faddists  who  left  alone  in  their  own  synagogues  would 
do  no  more  harm  than  the  Esseans  on  the  shore  of  the 
Dead  Sea.  But  presently  there  came  to  Jerusalem  Jews 
who  had  lived  in  Greece  and  whose  minds  had  been  freed 
from  the  iron  formalism  of  the  Jewish  ritual,  some  of 
them  regarding  the  sacred  Law  as  an  allegory.  Many  of 
these  Hellenised  Jews  were  attracted  by  the  teaching  of 
the  disciples,  and  some  of  the  more  enlightened  of  them 
saw  in  that  teaching  a  truth  deeper  than  was  apparent 
to  the  limited  understanding  of  the  Galilean  fishermen.1 

With  the  conversation  of  these  Hellenised  Jews  there 
came  a  new  vitality  and  also  a  new  courage  into  the 
little  synagogues  which  waited  for  the  return  of  Jesus. 
The  priests  scented  danger.  A  number  of  Pharisees  were 
detached  for  special  service  against  the  sectaries.  One 

1  It  is  useful  to  bear  in  mind  that  the  Jews  of  Palestine  were  less 
numerous  and  much  poorer  than  the  Jews  of  the  Dispersion — that  is 
to  say,  the  Jews  who  had  settled  in  cities  throughout  the  Near  East 
and  established  themselves  as  a  power  in  the  commerce  of  the  world. 


90 


SEVEN  AGES 


of  the  boldest  of  these  Hellenised  Jews  was  stoned  to 
death.  One  of  the  most  vigorous  of  the  persecuting 
Pharisees  was  converted  to  the  new  faith. 

Then  began  on  the  earth,  already  old  with  controversy, 
a  crucial  struggle  in  the  region  of  ideas — the  struggle 
between  Hebraism  and  Hellenism,  between  tradition  and 
evolution,  between  the  altar  and  the  leaven.  Peter  stood 
for  the  maintenance  of  the  Jewish  character  of  his 
faith;  Paul,  fresh  from  successful  journeys  among 
foreigners,  argued  with  him  for  an  extension  of  that 
faith  to  include  the  whole  world.  The  conversion  of 
a  Roman  centurion  helped  to  decide  the  issue.  Peter, 
albeit  with  no  great  enthusiasm,  capitulated  to  the  in¬ 
surgent  oratory  of  Paul.  Material  facts  began  to  tell 
in  the  favour  of  Hellenism.  The  little  body  of  the  cir¬ 
cumcised  faithful  waiting  in  Jerusalem  for  the  return  of 
its  Master  became  dependent  on  the  charity  of  uncircum¬ 
cised  foreigners  for  its  revenue.  Communism  had  failed. 
“The  world  did  not  come  to  an  end,  but  the  money  did.” 

It  was  in  its  contact  with  Greek  superstition  that  the 
teaching  of  Jesus  first  assumed  the  character  of  a  world 
religion.  Its  morality  was  not  altogether  unlike  the 
morality  of  Stoicism,  its  history  lent  itself  to  a  Platonic 
interpretation.  Heracleitus  had  described  the  supreme 
law  of  nature  as  the  Logos,  or  Speech,  of  God;  the  Stoics 
had  developed  this  idea,  and  Philo  had  made  the  Logos 
the  power  and  goodness  of  God ;  what  more  natural,  then, 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


9i 


that  the  Greeks  should  see  in  Jesus  a  fulfilment  of  this 
great  idea?  “In  the  beginning  was  the  Word,  and  the 
Word  was  with  God,  and  the  Word  was  God.” 

Moreover,  humanity  was  then  afflicted  by  a  world 
weariness,  which  was  strangely  favourable  to  a  new  re¬ 
ligious  impulse.  All  the  most  odious  forms  of  magic 
and  necromancy  which  were  filling  the  Roman  world 
with  frenzy  had  at  least  this  excuse,  that  they  witnessed 
to  a  hunger  and  thirst  on  the  part  of  mankind  for  moral 
cleanness.  None  of  those  superstitions  was  imposed  on 
the  world.  Each  one  of  them  came  at  the  call  of  human 
nature  for  defilement  and  terror — but  defilement  longing 
for  cleanness,  and  terror  longing  for  security.  The 
priest  with  a  chalice  full  of  blood,  the  priest  swinging 
his  rattle  and  whirling  in  a  dance,  the  priest  seizing  a 
virgin  in  the  sight  of  a  congregation,  these  were  men 
who  supplied  a  demand  of  degenerate  nature  for  an 
orgiastic  ritual  which  was  nevertheless  a  sacrament  of 
spiritual  life.  To  see  the  flowing  of  blood,  to  witness 
the  expiatory  death  of  a  fellow-creature,  to  eat  the  flesh 
and  to  drink  the  blood  of  a  sacrificial  animal,  to  take 
part  in  any  ceremony  symbolising  the  very  ancient  idea 
of  the  death  of  a  god  and  the  consumption  of  his  body 
by  those  who  desired  to  be  godlike,  this  was  not  only  to 
indulge  one’s  appetite  for  abomination  and  horror,  but 
to  take  away  in  one’s  shuddering  body  and  quivering 
nerves  a  sense  of  security  from  the  attacks  of  maleficent 
powers,  even  a  sense  of  regeneration. 


92 


SEVEN  AGES 


It  was  in  this  atmosphere  of  gross  superstition  and 
world  weariness  that  the  teaching  of  Jesus  became  the 
religion  of  Christianity.  Greek  genius,  which  had  fed 
itself  upon  the  morality  of  Socrates  and  the  idealism  of 
Plato,  ignored  in  that  teaching  every  element  which  was 
local,  accidental,  or  realistic,  and  fastened  with  a  fervent 
quickness  of  intelligence  and  a  creativeness  of  imagina¬ 
tion  wholly  unknown  among  other  people  upon  all  those 
elements  which  were  of  a  permanently  philosophical 
character.  To  the  Greek,  Jesus  was  an  incarnation  of 
God;  such  an  idea  presented  no  difficulty  to  his  mind; 
the  resurrection  symbolised  the  rising  of  the  spiritual 
man  from  the  death  of  sin.  The  world  was  not  coming 
to  an  end  for  the  benefit  of  the  Jews ;  what  was  coming  to 
an  end  was  an  age  of  darkness ;  and  the  new  millennium 
was  for  the  advantage  of  the  whole  human  race,  Jews 
and  Gentiles,  bond  and  free. 

The  Greek  had  no  word  for  the  strange  Hebrew  term 
of  Messiah :  it  was  a  word  which  could  not  be  translated 
and  which  could  not  fittingly  be  applied  to  Jesus  by  any 
nation  except  the  despised  Jews,  whom  the  Romans  re¬ 
garded  as  runaway  slaves  from  the  Egyptians;  therefore 
the  Greek  convert  had  to  invent  a  word  for  Jesus,  a  word 
which  he  could  not  have  understood  as  a  title,  for  his 
kings  had  never  been  anointed,  but  a  word  which  for 
him  had  the  significance  of  a  healing  ointment,  a  remedy 
smeared  on  the  body  of  a  sick  person.  Jesus  was  there¬ 
fore  called  Christ — the  Anointed  One.  To  this  name 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


93 


the  Greeks  added  a  title  more  or  less  equivalent  to  our 
term  of  Lord,  and  he  became  known,  not  as  Rabbi,  the 
appellation  by  which  he  was  chiefly  called  in  Galilee,  or 
as  Son  of  Man,  which  had  no  more  meaning  for  the 
Greek  than  it  has  for  us,  but  by  the  phrase  Kyrios 
Christos.  He  was  Lord  Christ,  and  those  who  followed 
him  were  Christians. 

The  pure  and  ennobling  character  of  Jesus  might  have 
been  lost  in  the  paganism  whose  worst  orgies  and  most 
contemptible  superstitions  his  moral  teaching  at  least 
tempered  and  refined,  but  for  a  remarkable  movement  in 
the  human  spirit  which  began  in  the  second  century  and 
reached  a  new  point  of  departure  for  mankind  with  the 
crash  of  the  Roman  Empire  at  the  beginning  of  the 
fifth. 

Among  the  converts  to  Christianity  in  the  latter  half 
of  the  second  century  was  a  scholarly  man  named 
Clement,  who  had  the  wit  to  perceive  that  if  God  raised 
up  prophets  in  Israel  there  was  no  reason  to  doubt  that 
He  also  raised  up  prophets  in  Greece.  If  Moses  was  in¬ 
spired,  so  too  was  Plato.  This  admirable  thesis  he  taught 
in  a  school  in  Alexandria,  and  among  his  pupils  was  a 
greater  man  than  his  master,  who  developed  the  idea  and 
carried  it  forward  into  the  third  century.  It  is  due  to 
Origen,  more  perhaps  than  to  any  other  man  of  the 
period,  that  Christianity  began  to  move  away  from  the 
baser  influences  of  Syrian  mythology  and  Greek  super- 


94 


SEVEN  AGES 


stition  to  the  higher  inspiration  of  Athenian  philosophy. 
Yet  it  was  Origen  who  borrowed  from  Greco- Asiatic 
cults  those  ideas  of  mystery  which  gave  to  Christianity  a 
sacrificial  character.  The  Cross  of  Jesus  became  the 
altar  of  Christ. 

Soon  after  the  death  of  Origen  another  and  a  far 
greater  scholar  from  Alexandria,  Plotinus,  so  shy  that 
he  stammered  in  his  discourses,  so  modest  that  he  would 
not  have  his  portrait  painted,  and  so  delicate  that  he  had 
to  study  his  plate  like  a  physician,  set  up  a  school  in 
Rome  for  the  revival  of  Platonism.  He  refused  to  join 
the  Christians,  but  he  developed  an  idealism  from  the 
teaching  of  Plato  which  bore  a  remarkable  resemblance 
to  the  teaching  of  Jesus.  His  influence  not  only  drew 
the  educated  pagan  away  from  unmanly  superstition,  but 
in  later  times  was  even  deemed  to  throw  a  philosophic 
light  on  the  simple  and  childlike  Christian  documents. 
When  he  lay  dying  he  said  to  a  friend  for  whom  he  had 
long  been  waiting:  “The  divine  in  me  is  struggling  to 
go  up  to  the  Divine  in  all” ;  and  as  he  gave  up  the  ghost, 
it  is  said  that  a  serpent  crawled  from  under  his  bed  and 
disappeared  into  a  crack  in  the  wall.  In  Porphyry  he 
left  a  disciple  who  carried  on  both  his  teaching  and  his 
stern  morality.  No  man  of  that  time  came  nearer  to  the 
Puritanism  of  Socrates.  Porphyry  hated  the  Christians 
and  wrote  against  them,  but  he  helped  to  keep  Hellenism 
alive  even  if  he  mixed  it  with  a  perilous  Chaldaeanism 
characteristic  of  that  demon-ridden  time. 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


95 


Thus  the  spirit  of  Socrates  rose  from  the  dead  and 
appeared  among  men  and  together  with  the  spirit  of 
Plato  became  an  unconscious  servant  in  the  house  of  the 
Galilean.  The  “glory”  of  Greece  had  long  ago  departed; 
but  ere  Rome  fell,  plunging  the  whole  world  into  a  long 
darkness,  the  light  of  Hellas  returned  to  earth  and  be¬ 
came  a  lantern  to  the  feet  of  a  new  European  civilisation 
struggling  with  the  powers  of  Asiatic  darkness. 

This  new  religion  answered  the  cry  of  the  human 
spirit  for  self-surrender  and  absorption  into  the  divine. 
Men  whose  hearts  almost  broke  under  the  devilish 
cruelty,  the  abhorrent  animalism,  and  the  defiling  super¬ 
stitions  which  proclaimed  loudly  enough  the  dying  of 
paganism,  fled  away  into  the  wilderness  and  worshipped 
God  in  a  solitude  which,  for  them,  was  the  completest 
form  of  companionship.  The  number  of  these  natural 
saints  was  presently  swelled  by  fanatics  who  had  heard 
wonderful  tales  either  of  their  austerities  or  of  their 
visions.  Some  of  those  people  did  indeed,  as  Byron  said 
of  one  of  them,  attempt  to  merit  heaven  by  making  earth 
a  hell,  and  many  no  doubt,  in  the  bitter  words  of  Gibbon, 
“aspired  to  reduce  themselves  to  the  rude  and  miserable 
state  in  which  the  human  brute  is  scarcely  distinguishable 
above  his  kindred  animals.”  All  sort  of  absurdities  ex¬ 
isted,  from  “the  humble  practice  of  grazing  in  the  fields 
of  Mesopotamia  with  the  common  herd”  to  the  bestowal 
by  the  Church  of  the  title  of  “Mother-in-law  of  God” 


96 


SEVEN  AGES 


on  a  wealthy  Roman  matron  who  gave  her  daughter  to 
be  “the  spouse  of  Christ”  and  herself  became  a  builder 
of  monasteries.  But  this  movement  began  in  genuine 
holiness,  a  state  of  mind  which  has  been  admirably  de¬ 
fined  as  “thinking  holy  thoughts,”  and  with  the  rise  of 
monasteries  which  it  brought  about  went  the  preserva¬ 
tion  of  learning,  while  every  monastic  establishment  in 
the  dying  world,  whatever  its  inner  discipline,  or  what¬ 
ever  the  motives  which  brought  men  there,  did  at  least 
stand  for  an  ideal  which  had  the  power  to  save  the  human 
race  from  self-destruction. 

It  came  about,  then,  that  the  Roman  Emperors  pres¬ 
ently  found  themselves  obliged  to  take  into  their  political 
consideration  a  new  religion.  The  proclamation  which 
made  Mithraism  the  official  religion  of  the  Roman  world 
was  a  dead  letter.  In  a  few  generations  an  Emperor 
ruled  over  the  world  who  was  a  Christian.  Arian 
Christianity  was  the  religion  of  the  dying  empire — a 
Christianity  which  did  not  make  Jesus  one  with  the 
supreme  Deity,  but  which  accepted  his  moral  teaching  as 
a  revelation  from  God  and  exalted  him  as  a  sacrifice  for 
the  sins  of  mankind. 

From  its  early  days  Christianity  had  brought  to  birth 
a  new  moral  idea.  Whatever  its  merits,  that  idea  was 
fatal  to  the  first  principles  of  the  Roman  Empire.  All 
men  are  equal  in  the  eyes  of  God.  Mercy  and  pacifism 
were  the  marks  of  a  true  Christian.  To  give  to  the 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


97 


poor,  to  nurse  the  sick,  to  care  notning  at  all  for  one’s 
own  social  advancement,  to  be  mindful  only  of  moral 
perfection,  to  see  in  the  slave  or  the  leper  a  brother 
whose  soul  was  dear  to  God,  and  in  the  emperor  a 
blasphemer  who  dared  to  arrogate  to  himself  the  dignity 
of  the  supreme  Father,  this  was  to  be  a  faithful  follower 
of  Jesus  and  a  bad  Roman  citizen.  Hospitals  were  built; 
revenue  was  collected  for  charity;  churches  were  formed 
in  all  parts  of  the  Empire  to  protect  the  humblest  Chris¬ 
tian  from  the  punishment  he  courted  in  refusing  military 
service  or  any  public  office  in  the  state.  It  is  true  that 
many  base  people  were  numbered  among  those  early 
Christians,  many  pariahs  and  outcasts,  many  “untouch¬ 
ables”  ;  but  the  strength  of  this  mighty  body  was  un¬ 
questionably  the  joyous  faith  with  which  the  highest 
minds  of  that  time  hailed  the  demands  of  a  new  moralitv. 
When  Arianism  was  denounced  and  the  Church  declared 
Jesus  to  be  of  the  same  substance  or  essence  of  the  self- 
existing  First  Cause,  Christianity,  with  its  vast  organisa¬ 
tion  and  its  innumerable  followers,  was  the  greatest 
power  in  the  Roman  Empire. 

In  the  year  410  those  citizens  of  Rome  who  lived  in 
the  neighbourhood  of  the  Salarian  Gate  were  awakened 
one  night  by  “the  tremendous  sound  of  the  Gothic 
trumpet.”  The  queen  of  cities,  the  mistress  of  the  world, 
that  great  and  eternal  metropolis  which  for  long  cen¬ 
turies  had  never  suffered  the  desecration  of  an  invader, 


98 


SEVEN  AGES 


fell  that  night  without  a  blow  to  the  hosts  of  Alaric.  To 
most  Romans,  even  the  most  degenerate  and  Asiatic,  this 
inexpressible  shame  seemed  like  the  end  of  the  world. 
“No  doubt,”  wrote  the  monk  Jerome  from  his  cell  in 
Bethlehem,  “all  things  born  are  doomed  to  die,  and  that 
which  has  grown  to  maturity  must  grow  old.  Every 
work  of  man  is  attacked  by  decay,  and  destroyed  by  age. 
But  who  would  believe  that  Rome,  victorious  so  oft  over 
the  universe,  would  at  last  crumble  to  pieces,  the  mother 
at  once  and  the  grave  of  her  children?  She  who  made 
slaves  of  the  East  has  herself  become  a  slave,  and  nobles 
once  laden  with  riches  now  come  a-begging  to  little 
Bethlehem.  In  vain  I  try  to  draw  myself  away  from  the 
sight  by  turning  to  my  books.  I  am  unable  to  heed  them.” 

To  one  man  at  least,  however,  the  tremendous  sound 
of  the  Gothic  trumpet  came,  not  as  the  last  trump,  but  as 
the  reveille  of  a  new  world.  For  him  Alaric  was  no 
harbinger  of  the  world’s  destruction,  but  rather  an  un¬ 
conscious  angel  of  God,  the  herald  of  Europe.  This  man 
was  the  Christian  Bishop  of  Hippo,  Augustine. 

He  had  been  born  in  the  year  354.  His  father  was 
a  person  of  violent  temper,  but  his  mother,  a  Christian 
from  birth,  was  a  woman  of  singular  gentleness,  so  that 
her  husband  did  not  beat  her,  to  the  wonder  of  other 
matrons.  The  character  of  this  woman  Monica  helps 
one  to  understand  the  triumph  of  Christianity  better  than 
many  a  theological  treatise.  From  her,  Augustine  in- 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


99 


herited  a  hunger  and  thirst  after  truth  which  was  to 
rescue  his  life  at  long  last  from  the  ruins  threatened  by 
his  paternal  inheritance — a  violence  of  the  passions  for 
many  years  quite  ungovernable. 

His  boyhood  gave  no  promise  either  of  distinction  or 
virtue.  He  was  rather  stupid  as  well  as  incurably  vicious. 
“It  appears/’  says  Bayle,  “that  he  was  what  we  call  a 
Rake;  he  shunned  the  school  as  the  plague;  he  loved  no¬ 
thing  but  gaming  and  public  shows ;  he  stole  all  he  could 
from  his  father;  he  invented  a  thousand  lies  to  avoid  the 
rod,  which  they  were  obliged  to  make  use  of,  to  punish 
his  licentiousness.”  In  spite  of  the  rod,  however,  and 
even  in  spite  of  the  prayers  and  entreaties  of  his  mother, 
Augustine,  who  was  destined  in  the  purposes  of  God  to 
shape  the  civilisation  of  the  world  in  an  hour  of  perilous 
calamity,  continued  to  live  so  whole-heartedly  in  the  ways 
of  debasement  that  perhaps  to  his  life’s  end  he  was  never 
free  from  the  coarsest  tendencies  of  human  nature.  But 
at  the  age  of  nineteen  a  book  by  Cicero  awakened  the 
intellectual  curiosity  of  this  young  rake,  and  before  he 
was  twenty  he  read  with  avidity  a  Latin  translation  of 
Aristotle’s  Ten  Categories.  To  his  carnal  obsessions  was 
now  added  the  spiritual  vice  of  ambition.  He  decided  to 
make  a  name  for  himself.  He  threw  aside  with  con¬ 
tempt  the  documents  of  his  mother’s  religion,  adopted 
the  doctrines  of  the  Manicheans,  and  set  out  to  become  a 
master  not  only  of  all  knowledge  but  of  all  mystery. 

For  ten  years  he  was  a  student  of  this  school  of 


100 


SEVEN  AGES 


necromancy,  founded  by  a  Persian  painter  who  an¬ 
nounced  himself  as  the  Comforter  promised  by  Jesus. 
Gradually  he  lost  faith  in  it,  and  for  some  years  suffered 
that  terrible  torture  of  the  mind  which  afflicts  all  pas¬ 
sionate  seekers  of  intellectual  certainty.  He  continued  to 
live  with  no  moral  principles  while  he  was  seeking  with 
his  tormented  spirit  this  pillow  of  repose  for  his  dis¬ 
tracted  reason.  “In  disputing  with  unlearned  Chris¬ 
tians,”  he  said  afterwards,  “I  had  almost  always  the  ill 
fortune  to  get  the  better  of  them;  which  frequent  suc¬ 
cess  still  added  fresh  fuel  to  the  heat  of  my  youth,  and 
hurried  me  headlong  into  that  greatest  of  mischiefs, 
obstinacy.” 

At  last  he  found  peace  for  his  intellect,  but  not  for 
his  passions.  He  came  under  the  influence  of  Ambrose, 
Bishop  of  Milan,  who  made  an  impression  on  him,  but 
could  not  give  him  the  mathematical  proof  of  Christi¬ 
anity  for  which  he  was  seeking.  However,  still  under 
the  moral  influence  of  the  pious  bishop,  he  presently 
came  upon  the  works  of  Plato  for  the  first  time  in  his 
life,  which  enkindled  in  him,  he  tells  us,  “an  incredible 
conflagration.”  For  a  little  while  he  thought  he  had 
found  rest  for  his  soul,  but  reading  the  epistles  of  Paul 
in  the  light  of  that  Platonic  conflagration,  and  haunted 
by  the  phrase  so  continually  on  the  lips  of  Ambrose, 
“the  letter  killeth,  but  the  spirit  giveth  life,”  he  yielded 
to  the  Galilean,  and  was  baptized  by  Ambrose  in  the 
presence  of  his  mother,  Monica,  who  came  to  Italy  for 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


IOI 


this  satisfaction  of  her  beautiful  soul,  on  Easter  Eve,  the 
25th  of  April,  387. 

Alaric,  we  must  remind  ourselves,  though  a  barbarian, 
was  a  Christian.  Among  the  captives  carried  off  to 
Germany  from  former  raids  into  Italy  there  were  num¬ 
erous  followers  of  the  new  religion,  and  among  them, 
or  as  a  missionary  to  them,  was  one  Ulfilas,  whose 
character  made  so  great  an  impression  on  the  Goths  that 
they  renounced  their  dark  gods  and  embraced  the  hope  of 
immortal  life  offered  to  them  by  this  follower  of  Jesus. 
As  it  happened  Ulfilas  had  been  transported  during  the 
reign  of  Arius,  and  accordingly  all  these  Goths  were  con¬ 
verted  to  a  Christianity  which  did  not  identify  Jesus  with 
the  supreme  Father  in  Heaven.  They  therefore  found 
themselves  in  Rome  to  be,  not  Christians,  as  they  had 
supposed,  but  heretics ;  while  the  conquered  Romans  were 
stung  to  fury,  if  not  to  pious  zeal,  at  finding  themselves 
treated  bv  these  base  barbarians  who  dared  to  call  them- 
selves  Christians  as  “the  sectaries  of  Athanasius.”  Thus 
it  came  about  that  the  clash  in  Rome  at  the  beginning  of 
the  fifth  century  was  not  only  a  clash  of  arms  but  a  clash 
of  ideas,  not  only  the  clash  of  a  corrupt  and  perishing 
civilisation  with  a  new  and  hardy,  if  barbarian,  manhood, 
but  the  clash  of  hostile  theologies,  both  of  whose  disciples 
followed  the  Galilean  with  a  sword.  Christianity  had 
conquered  the  world ;  her  only  enemies  were  those  of  her 
own  household. 


102 


SEVEN  AGES 


To  Augustine,  in  his  African  bishopric,  the  fall  of 
Rome,  as  we  have  said,  did  not  appear  so  lamentable 
and  despairful  a  catastrophe  as  it  appeared  to  Jerome, 
nor  did  he  regard  it,  like  so  many  pagan  Romans  de¬ 
spoiled  of  their  goods,  as  the  end  of  all  things.  To  his 
penetrating  and  comprehensive  intellect,  this  fall  of  the 
mightiest  power  in  the  annals  of  the  human  race  seemed 
rather  a  blessing  than  a  disaster.  Something  great  had 
indeed  fallen,  something  once  splendid  had  indeed  toppled 
into  ruins ;  but  there  was  still  the  firm  earth  beneath  those 
tumbled  stones  and  broken  pillars,  and  on  that  same  earth 
might  be  erected  an  empire  so  great  and  so  splendid  that 
in  the  burning  light  of  its  ascension  the  former  glory 
which  had  passed  away  would  seem  like  the  fitful  glimmer 
of  a  candle. 

He  conceived  the  idea  of  Christendom.  On  the  ruins 
of  Caesar’s  throne  was  to  arise  the  chair  of  God’s  vicar, 
and  on  the  foundations  of  physical  power  were  to  stand 
the  everlasting  walls  of  spiritual  brotherhood.  A  new 
authority  was  to  reign  over  human  life — the  moral  law. 
No  such  dream  had  ever  before  entered  the  mind  of  man, 
and  so  inspired  was  Augustine  by  this  vision  of  a  new 
world  order  that  he  devoted  the  rest  of  his  life  to  making 
his  idea  at  once  the  policy  of  the  Church  and  the  aspira¬ 
tion  of  mankind. 

Few  books  have  so  powerfully  affected  the  destinies 
of  the  human  race  as  the  De  Civitate  Dei  of  Augustine. 
In  spite  of  an  interpretation  of  the  Hebrew  scriptures 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


103 


which  to  us  is  ludicrous,  and  a  theory  of  the  universe 
got  entirely  from  the  Jews,  and  a  theology  which  for  the 
modern  scholar  is  fallacious  in  its  first  essentials,  this 
book,  which  has  done  so  much  evil  and  so  much  good,  did 
nevertheless  create  the  idea  of  a  spiritual  kingdom  on 
earth  and  did  put  humanity  on  a  road  which  was  its  best 
way  of  escape  from  the  ruins  of  Roman  civilisation. 

It  is  true  that  Augustine,  because  of  his  faulty  theology, 
suggested  to  the  Church  a  direction  which  was  bound  to 
end  in  imperialism,  and  gave  an  impulse  to  the  leaders 
of  Christianity  which  was  almost  bound  to  land  them  in 
tyranny  and  despotism;  but  even  if  it  be  true  that  all 
the  tragedy  of  the  Church’s  brutal  effort  to  secure  tempo¬ 
ral  power  and  to  stamp  out  with  an  iron  heel  the  freedom 
of  the  human  mind  may  be  traced  back  to  Augustine, 
still  it  must  be  clearly  understood  that  Augustine  himself 
never  conceived  such  an  idea,  while  he  did  contribute  to 
the  fortunes  of  humanity  an  idea  which  helped  it  to  lay 
the  foundations  of  a  new  civilisation  and  which,  if  re¬ 
alised,  would  even  now  reduce  the  ruinous  chaos  of 
European  politics  to  some  semblance  of  order  and  in¬ 
telligence. 

But  the  great  good  of  this  remarkable  book  lies,  almost 
unconsciously,  in  its  liberal  tendencies.  Augustine  had 
to  make  war  on  the  philosophers,  and  he  made  war  as 
a  philosopher.  Bitterly  as  he  may  speak  of  heretics,  and 
contemptuously  as  he  may  refer  to  the  superstitions  of 
even  great  Greek  philosophers,  including  Plotinus  and 


104 


SEVEN  AGES 


Porphyry,  he  is  almost  a  Platonist  himself  in  dealing  with 
Plato.  Porphyry  might  “float  between  the  surges  of 
sacrilegious  curiosity  and  honest  philosophy/’  but  So¬ 
crates  was  “the  first  that  reduced  philosophy  to  the 
reformation  of  manners,”  applying  his  mind  to  a  “set 
and  certain  invention  for  an  assistance  unto  beatitude,” 
so  that  the  mind  “unladen  of  terrestrial  distractions  might 
tower  up  to  eternity”;  while  as  for  the  philosophy  of 
Plato,  who  saw  in  the  contemplation  and  worship  of  God 
the  supreme  good  of  life,  “some  of  our  Christians  admire 
at  these  assertions  of  Plato  coming  so  near  to  our  belief 
of  God,  so  that  some  think  that  at  his  going  to  Egypt  he 
heard  the  prophet  Jeremiah.” 

Augustine,  it  may  be  said,  never  mentions  the  name 
of  Plato  save  with  respect,  often  with  reverence,  and 
occasionally  with  the  affection  of  one  great  mind  for 
another.  The  effect  of  this  attitude  towards  Platonism 
was  to  keep  alive  in  the  Church,  at  a  time  of  great  theo¬ 
logical  narrowness  and  in  an  age  seething  with  supersti¬ 
tion,  the  beautiful  and  liberal  spirit  of  Hellenism. 
Traditionalist  as  he  was  in  so  many  respects,  and  most 
of  them  fatal  respects,  in  this  respect  at  least  Augustine 
was  a  Modernist,  that  he  admitted  philosophy  into  the 
house  of  faith.  If  from  him  tyranny  received  its  excuse, 
and  temporal  power  its  ply,  from  him  also  theology 
received  that  evolutionary  impulse  which  has  saved 
Christianity  from  the  provincialism  and  obscuratism  of 
the  sacerdotal  pagan.  In  the  West,  at  least,  the  leaven 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE 


105 


of  Christianity  has  been  allowed  to  work,  and  the  long 
evolution  of  this  the  most  noble  of  all  the  religions  of 
mankind  is  by  no  means  at  a  halt. 

It  is  important  to  remember,  too,  that  if  Augustine 
set  the  Western  Church  on  its  great  journey  believing 
in  a  Christ  only  a  little  more  historically  true  than 
the  Adam  and  Eve  in  whose  existence  he  found  the 
genesis  of  the  incarnation,  he  also  gave  her  the  most 
conquering  truths  for  her  warfare  with  a  blundering 
world. 

Throughout  his  book  rings  the  affirmation  that  the 
love  of  God  is  the  end  of  man,  and  that  in  the  love  of 
God  can  man  alone  find  happiness.  Moreover,  he  sweeps 
away  the  pagan  theory  of  “pleasing  God”  by  worship  and 
sacrifice.  “God  has  no  need  of  men’s  cattle,  nor  any 
earthly  good  of  his,  no,  not  his  justice.”  The  worship 
of  God  is  for  man’s  advantage,  not  for  God’s  satisfaction. 
“One  cannot  say  he  does  the  fountain  good  by  drinking 
of  it,  or  the  light  by  seeing  it.”  Is  it  not  written,  “Pity 
thine  own  soul,  and  please  God”  ?  Throughout  his  pages 
one  finds  this  keen  perception  of  the  most  essential  truth 
of  all  religion,  and  it  is  with  his  heart  almost  singing 
with  the  joy  of  his  discovery  that  he  quotes  the  great 
words :  “Wherewith  shall  I  come  before  the  Lord  and 
bow  myself  before  the  high  God?  Shall  I  come  before 
Him  with  burnt  offerings,  and  with  calves  of  a  year 
old?  Will  the  Lord  be  pleased  with  thousands  of  rams, 


io6 


SEVEN  AGES 


or  with  ten  thousand  rivers  of  oil  ?  Shall  I  give  my  first¬ 
born  for  the  transgression,  even  the  fruit  of  my  body  for 
the  sin  of  my  soul?  He  has  showed  thee,  O  man,  what 
is  good,  and  what  the  Lord  requires  of  thee :  surely  to 
do  justice  and  to  love  mercy,  and  to  humble  thyself,  and 
to  walk  with  thy  God.” 

It  was  largely  owing  to  Augustine’s  insistence  on  love, 
mercy,  and  humility  as  the  first  elements  in  the  religious 
life  that  Europe  came  into  being  from  the  ruins  of  Roman 
civilisation  with  a  beautiful  tenderness  and  a  gracious 
chivalry  consecrating  the  vestiges  of  a  noble  Stoicism 
which  happily  for  mankind  survived  the  downfall  of  the 
Empire.  To  him  more  than  to  any  man  in  that  period 
of  world  calamity  belongs  the  eternal  honour  of  giving 
to  humanity  a  new  conception  of  manhood — a  manhood 
which  preserved  all  that  was  best  in  the  civilisations  of 
Athens  and  Rome  and  illuminated  all  that  was  most 
enduring  in  the  religion  of  Christianity.  This  new  man¬ 
hood  was  founded  upon  the  morality  of  Jesus. 

One  of  the  greatest  of  Roman  Catholic  scholars  in 
recent  years,  Lord  Acton,  once  wrote  to  Bishop  Mandell 
Creighton  a  letter  which  contains  a  passage  of  singular 
importance  to  the  student  of  ideas.  It  is  a  fashion  among 
those  who  lean  their  Christianity  on  rites  and  ceremonies, 
and  who  maintain  that  the  centre  of  this  religion  is  the 
mystery  of  the  Eucharist,  well-knowing  its  late  and  pagan 
origin,  to  depreciate  both  preaching  and  the  moral  teach- 
ing  of  Jesus.  But  Acton  wrote :  .  .  That  would 


THE  AGE  OF  AUGUSTINE  107 

imply  that  Christianity  is  a  mere  system  of  metaphysics 
which  borrowed  some  ethics  from  elsewhere.  It  is  rather 
a  system  of  ethics  which  borrowed  its  metaphysics  else¬ 
where.’ ’ 


CHAPTER  V 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 
(1467-1536) 


CHAPTER  V 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 
(1467-1536) 

The  dream  of  Augustine  came  to  the  brink  of  fulfilment. 
With  the  fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  there  was  in  Europe 
no  one  rallying-point  for  the  moral  and  spiritual  forces 
of  humanity  save  the  Christian  Church — that  “little 
corner  of  rationality”  in  the  world  of  dangerous 
animalism.  By  the  nobility  of  its  moral  teaching  and 
the  attractive  character  of  its  earliest  apostles,  this 
strange  religion,  which  had  been  evolved  from  the 
prophecies  of  Jesus  in  Galilee,  gradually  became  an 
authoritative  power  of  international  good  omen.  But 
while  devoted  monks  leavened  the  ignorance  and  brutality 
of  barbarism  with  the  incomparable  ethics  of  Jesus,  cre¬ 
ating  an  entirely  new  set  of  values  for  the  human  mind, 
turning  men’s  eyes  from  earth  to  heaven,  and  their  hearts 
from  selfishness  to  unselfishness,  Popes  and  Christian 
kings,  impatient  of  the  leaven’s  slow  fermentation,  sought 
to  extend  the  dominion  of  Christ  and  the  empires  of 

their  own  temporal  power  by  means  of  the  sword. 

hi 


112 


SEVEN  AGES 


Far  too  much  has  been  made  of  the  paganism  which 
corrupted  Christianity  and  the  religious  imperialism 
which  disgraced  the  Dark  Ages.  These  evils  are  obvious 
enough :  so  obvious,  indeed,  that  the  very  existence  of 
Christianity  at  the  present  time  should  warn  us  against 
the  dangerous  error  of  seeking  there  for  the  true  threads 
of  historical  continuity.  Paganism  did,  of  a  truth,  take 
command  of  the  machinery  of  the  Church,  and,  of  a 
truth,  the  sword  was  seldom  out  of  the  hand  of  Pope  and 
Emperor;  but  the  force  which  conquered  the  world  and 
came  so  near  to  fulfilling  the  dream  of  Augustine  was  the 
ethical  message  of  Jesus  preached  and  lived  by  humble 
men  whose  characters  were  like  a  new  music  in  the  soul 
of  humanity. 

It  may  be  well  to  suggest,  if  only  in  passing,  that  the 
evolutionary  principle,  if  valid  in  the  spiritual  sphere, 
may  most  fittingly,  and  of  course  most  reverently,  be 
applied  to  Jesus  of  Galilee.  Those  who  earnestly  be¬ 
lieve  from  patient  and  unselfish  research  of  the  Christian 
documents  that  Jesus  looked  for  the  end  of  an  age,  that 
he  anticipated  the  interposition  of  God  on  the  Cross,  and 
that  he  gave  up  the  ghost  in  a  moment  of  tragic  desola¬ 
tion  of  spirit,  bitterly  and  desperately  disillusioned,  are 
nevertheless  entitled  to  believe  that  he  realised  after  death 
a  deeper  meaning  in  his  unique  consciousness  of  unity 
with  God,  and  that  ever  since  Calvary  his  divine  spirit 
has  been  growing,  not  only  in  the  knowledge  of  God’s 


ERASM  US 

From  the  portrait  by  Holbein 
Original  in  the  Louvre 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS  113 

purpose,  but  also  in  its  own  power  to  help  the  human 
race  towards  the  consummation  of  terrestrial  existence. 
This  is  to  say,  that  there  is  no  reason  in  logic  for  those 
who  hold  the  spiritual  thesis  of  life  why  Jesus  of  Galilee, 
of  an  exquisite  loveliness  in  character,  but  limited  both  in 
knowledge  and  power,  should  not  now  be  regarded  as 
the  Christ  of  God,  a  continuing  Christ  who  is  for  ever, 
with  a  power  that  for  ever  increases,  inspiring  the  soul 
of  humanity. 

And  so,  therefore,  with  the  history  of  the  Church. 
At  first  the  disciples  waited  for  a  physical  return  of 
their  Lord,  living  as  communists  in  the  midst  of  a  perish¬ 
ing  world ;  then,  with  a  newer  understanding,  and  greater 
inspiration,  the  spirit  of  Greek  philosophy  penetrated  the 
Church  and  gave  it  a  catholic  sympathy,  a  pagan  colour, 
an  almost  universal  appeal;  and  then,  with  success,  came 
the  temptation  of  “all  the  kingdoms  of  the  world,  and  the 
glory  of  them,”  to  which  the  Church  fell  with  direful 
consequences  for  mankind.  But  from  the  first  move¬ 
ment  of  this  new  spirit  in  human  life  the  real  evolution 
was  moral,  and  that  evolution,  working  in  the  hearts  of 
men  like  Benedict  and  women  like  Monica,  saved  the 
secret  of  Jesus  not  only  from  the  paganism  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  altar  but  from  the  Christian  sword  of  Charlemagne 
and  from  the  atheisms  and  iniquities  of  the  Bishops  of 
Rome.  The  idea  of  Jesus  lived  on.  The  character  of 
Jesus  moved  upon  the  face  of  the  waters  of  the  Dark 
Ages,  and  Jesus  breathed  into  the  nostrils  of  heathen 


SEVEN  AGES 


114 

Europe  the  breath  of  a  new  life,  that  humanity  might 
become  in  the  process  of  evolution  a  living  Christendom. 

At  the  time  of  Erasmus  the  Church  had  sunk  to  an 
almost  inconceivable  depth  of  moral  and  intellectual 
depravity.  The  monasteries,  which  had  done  their 
greatest  work  in  saving  the  wreckage  of  Greek  and 
Roman  culture,  which  had  kept  the  lamp  of  learning 
alight  in  an  age  of  universal  darkness,  and  which  had 
saved  some  of  the  greatest  of  the  arts  from  destruction, 
were  now,  for  the  most  part,  in  a  state  of  torpor,  well- 
nigh  bestial,  and  certainly  of  little  use  to  the  struggling 
conscience  of  Europe.  Erasmus,  for  example,  who 
was  brought  up  in  a  monastery,  found  that  he  might 
get  drunk  as  often  as  he  chose,  but  that  he  must  not 
study.  So  far  as  England  is  concerned,  this  decline  of 
the  monastic  orders,  according  to  Sir  Thomas  More, 
was  a  hundred  years  old  at  the  dawn  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  The  English  monasteries,  let  us  remind 
ourselves,  were  condemned  by  a  commission  appointed 
by  the  Pope. 

Yet  everywhere  in  Europe  men  existed  who  saw  that 
Christianity  was  essential  to  the  safety  and  welfare  of 
mankind.  In  England,  beyond  all  question,  this  spirit 
was  stronger  and  more  courageous  than  anywhere  else 
throughout  Europe.  WyclifFe  and  Langland  witness  in 
the  fourteenth  century  to  the  moral  earnestness  of  the 
country,  and  men  like  More,  Colet,  and  Fisher  in  the 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS  115 

early  days  of  the  sixteenth  century  were  before  every¬ 
thing  else  profoundly  Christian.  So,  too,  at  the  begin¬ 
ning  of  his  illustrious  reign  was  Henry  the  Eighth,  “the 
most  deeply  read  and  the  most  nobly  intentioned  of  all 
the  English  Kings,”  according  to  More,  and,  according  to 
Erasmus  in  1519,  “Future  ages  will  tell  how  England 
throve,  how  virtue  flourished  in  the  reign  of  Henry 
VIII,  and  how  the  nation  was  born  again,  how  piety  re¬ 
vived,  how  learning  grew  to  a  height  which  Italy  may 
envy,  and  how  the  prince  who  reigned  over  it  was  a  rule 
and  pattern  for  all  time  to  come.”  He  wrote  from 
Louvain  to  an  English  friend : 

“Oh,  splendid  England,  house  and  citadel  of  virtue 
and  learning!  How  do  I  congratulate  you  on  having 
such  a  prince  to  rule  you,  and  your  prince  on  subjects 
which  throw  such  lustre  on  his  reign!  No  land  in  all 
the  world  is  like  England.  In  no  land  would  I  love 
better  to  spend  my  days.  Intellect  and  honesty  thrive 
in  England  under  the  Prince’s  favour.  In  England  there 
is  no  masked  sanctimoniousness,  and  the  empty  babble 
of  educated  ignorance  is  driven  out  or  put  to  silence.” 

And  again  he  writes : 

“The  King  is  the  heartiest  man  living  and  delights 
in  good  books.  The  Queen  is  miraculously  learned  for 
a  woman,  and  is  equally  pious  and  excellent.  Both  of 
them  like  to  be  surrounded  by  the  most  accomplished  of 


n6 


SEVEN  AGES 


their  subjects.  Linacre  is  Court  physician,  and  what  he 
is  I  need  not  say.  Thomas  More  is  in  the  Privy  Council. 
Mount  joy  is  in  the  Queen’s  household.  Colet  is  Court 
preacher.  Stokesly,  a  master  of  Greek,  Hebrew,  Latin, 
and  scholastic  theology,  is  a  Privy  Councillor  also.  The 
Palace  is  full  of  such  men,  a  very  museum  of  knowledge.” 

He  sums  it  all  up  in  a  letter  from  Antwerp  in  May, 

1519: 

“The  world  is  waking  out  of  a  long  sleep.  The  old 
ignorance  is  still  defended  with  tooth  and  claw,  but  we 
have  kings  and  nobles  now  on  our  side.  Strange 
vicissitude  of  things.  Time  was  when  learning  was  only 
found  in  the  religious  orders.  The  religious  orders  nowa¬ 
days  care  only  for  money  and  sensuality,  while  learning 
has  passed  to  secular  princes  and  peers  and  courtiers. 
Where  in  school  or  monastery  will  you  find  so  many 
distinguished  men  as  form  your  English  Court?  Shame 
on  us  all!  The  tables  of  priests  and  divines  run  with 
wine  and  echo  with  drunken  noise  and  scurrilous  jest, 
while  in  princes’  halls  is  heard  only  grave  and  modest 
conversation  on  points  of  morals  or  knowledge.  Your 
King  leads  the  rest  by  his  example.  In  ordinary  ac¬ 
complishments  he  is  above  most  and  inferior  to  none. 
Where  will  you  find  a  man  so  acute,  so  copious,  so 
soundly  judging,  or  so  dignified  in  word  and  manner? 
.  .  .  Who  will  say  now  that  learning  makes  kings 
effeminate?  Where  is  a  finer  soldier  than  your  Henry 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


ii  7 


VIII,  where  a  sounder  legislator?  Who  is  keener  in 
council,  who  a  stricter  administrator,  who  more  careful 
in  choosing  his  ministers,  or  more  anxious  for  the  peace 
of  the  world?  That  King  of  yours  may  bring  back  the 
golden  age.  .  . 

All  this  is  true  enough  of  the  times  when  the  words 
were  written.  Never  has  a  greater  man  than  Henry 
the  Eighth  sat  on  the  English  throne,  greater  in  scholar¬ 
ship,  greater  in  courage,  greater  in  self-reliance,  and 
greater  in  that  mysterious  spiritual  force  which  we  call 
personality.  At  the  dawn  of  his  reign  he  was  the  most 
accomplished  prince  in  Christendom,  one  of  the  strongest 
men  in  his  kingdom,  one  of  the  gladdest  spirits  in  all  the 
world.  Yet  he  had  in  him  seeds  of  egoism  fatal  to  char¬ 
acter.  The  duplicity  of  his  brother  kings,  and  the 
cowardice  of  the  Popes  of  Rome,  gradually  darkened  the 
original  brightness  of  his  candour,  and  brought  him  at 
last  to  an  egoism  which,  while  it  saved  England,  spoiled 
the  wonderful  promise  of  his  earlier  character,  and 
shattered  the  great  dream  of  Augustine.  Tragically  true 
is  the  final  verdict  of  his  fairest  historian,  Mr.  A.  F. 
Pollard :  “Every  inch  a  King,  Henry  VIII  never  attained 
the  stature  of  a  gentleman.” 

But  the  panegyric  of  Erasmus,  while  it  is  true  of 
the  English  Court  in  the  opening  years  of  this  fateful 
century,  obscures  the  truth  of  England’s  national  life. 

Men,  emerging  from  all  the  losses  and  confusions 


n8 


SEVEN  AGES 


of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses,  had  chiefly  one  thought  in 
their  mind  on  the  accession  of  Henry  the  Eighth,  the 
thought  of  getting  back  as  soon  as  possible  to  the  pro¬ 
sperity  of  normal  business.  To  this  end,  they  sacrificed 
political  independence,  shuffled  with  the  categorical  im¬ 
peratives  of  religion,  abandoned  themselves  with  charac¬ 
teristic  English  energy  to  materialism,  and  bore  without 
one  twinge  of  conscience  encroachments  on  their  liberty 
which  were  destructive  of  true  manhood.  The  King 
became  a  tyrant  because  his  people  wished  him  to  be  a 
tyrant.  They  asked  of  him  only  one  liberty — the  liberty 
to  develop  their  trade  and  farm  their  land.  For  the  rest, 
they  placed  complete  trust  in  the  wisdom  of  their  prince, 
regarded  Parliament  with  contempt,  and  concerned  them¬ 
selves  with  religion  only  to  pray  that  quarrels  in  the 
Church  would  not  bring  a  fresh  confusion  to  their  profit¬ 
able  commerce  .  They  looked  for  the  finger-prints  of 
progress  in  the  ledgers  of  the  custom-house. 

Henry’s  long  contention  with  Rome  was  dictated  in 
the  first  instance  solely  by  patriotism.  Born  of  a  family 
which  bred  with  difficulty,  and  which  had  ever  been 
afflicted  by  a  terrifying  mortality  among  the  few  infants 
it  managed  to  produce,  this  son  of  a  usurper,  this  descend¬ 
ant  of  a  Welsh  clerk  of  the  wardrobe,  himself  a  second 
son  who  had  outlived  his  elder  brother,  desired  for  the 
sake  of  England  to  make  his  succession  safe.  Catharine 
of  Aragon  gave  him  no  son.  Long  years  after  his 
attempt  to  nullify  that  unfortunate  boyish  marriage,  on 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS  119 

the  ground  that  as  she  was  the  widow  of  his  brother 
therefore  he  ought  not  to  have  been  allowed  to  marry 
her,  he  proposed  to  marry  Anne  Boleyn  only  because  she 
had  conceived  a  child  by  him — the  illegitimate  Elizabeth 
who  was  destined  to  crown  with  glory  the  work  which 
her  father  had  begun  for  England.  Throughout  the 
eventful  life  of  this  great  person  a  just-minded  student 
of  history  finds  a  passion  for  England  which  illumines 
all  his  acts  and  at  least  redeems  even  the  worst  of  his 
faults  from  inexcusable  iniquity.  Surrounded  by  princes 
who  endeavoured  to  trick  and  outwit  him,  threatened 
by  emperors  and  popes  with  destruction  and  excom¬ 
munication,  menaced  in  his  own  kingdom  by  civil  war 
and  a  religious  schism  fatal  to  peace,  this  scholar- 
monarch,  this  musician  and  athletic  sportsman,  this 
theologian  and  wise  far-seeing  statesman,  took  the  reins 
of  government  into  his  own  hands,  and  with  the  consent 
of  England  became  England’s  tyrant,  saving  her  from 
the  risk  and  ignominy  of  Italian  dictation,  making  her 
name  feared  and  respected  throughout  all  the  courts  of 
Europe,  laying  the  foundations  of  a  strength,  a  pro¬ 
sperity,  and  a  glory  which  have  continued  to  this  day,  but 
bringing  upon  his  country  a  confusion  in  religious  things 
which  has  not  even  now  worked  itself  out,  and  begetting 
a  spirit  of  materialism  which  has  not  perished  even  in 
the  ruins  of  the  Great  War. 

One  instance  must  suffice  of  the  moral  character  of 
the  princes  with  whom  he  found  himself  entangled  on 


120 


SEVEN  AGES 


the  continent  of  Europe.  Ferdinand,  the  father  of  his 
wife,  used  Catharine  in  his  attempts  to  hoodwink  and 
trick  the  King  of  England.  Someone  told  this  Catholic 
King  that  a  rival  charged  him  with  having  twice  cheated 
him.  “He  lies!  I  cheated  him  three  times,”  was  the 
retort  of  Ferdinand.  To  understand  both  the  masterful 
nationalism  and  the  moral  decay  of  Henry,  one  must 
acquaint  himself  with  the  political  character  of  Europe 
at  the  time  of  the  revival  of  learning.  It  was  a  den  of 
thieves. 

Nothing  in  Henry  is  of  more  significance  to  the 
student  of  human  nature  than  the  extraordinary  degree 
to  which  he  carried  his  capacity  to  deceive  himself.  Here 
was  a  man  who  heard  masses  three  or  four  times  a  day, 
who  crept  to  the  Cross  on  Good  Friday,  who  earned  from 
the  Pope  by  a  theological  treatise  the  proud  title  of  De¬ 
fender  of  the  Faith,  who  called  Luther  “the  serpent,” 
who  listened  with  admiration  to  the  noble  sermons  of 
Colet  and  the  noble  conversation  of  More,  who  was  the 
last  person  in  the  world  to  be  stigmatised  as  a  hypocrite : 
and  yet  this  pious  King  lived  the  greater  part  of  his  life 
in  the  most  wanton  defiance  of  the  Faith  he  was  so  proud 
to  defend,  and  in  complete  ignorance  of  the  fact  that 
he  was  himself  a  very  travesty  of  the  religion  he 
championed. 

He  was  vain.  He  was  proud.  He  was  uncharitable. 
He  was  selfish.  He  was  merciless.  In  the  end,  he  was 
cruel.  Melanchthon  likened  him,  this  Defender  of  the 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


12 1 


Faith,  this  follower  of  Jesus  of  Galilee,  even  to  Nero,  a 
comparison  which  is  unjust,  for  to  the  end  of  his  days 
King  Henry  remained  a  man;  but  it  is  a  comparison 
which  prevents  us  from  overlooking  the  depths  to  which 
his  spirit  fell.  Yet  he  never  knew  it.  To  the  last  he 
believed  himself  to  be  the  foremost  champion  of  Jesus, 
and  with  the  scaffold  running  blood  in  his  kingdom 
passed  out  of  human  life  wringing  Cranmer’s  hand  in 
token  that  he  trusted  in  Christ. 

This  amazing  instance  of  self-deception  helps  one 
to  understand  the  difficulties  which  attended  the  new 
birth  of  Europe  into  the  present  period  of  civilisation. 
Henry’s  piety  was  nothing  more  than  pagan  superstition 
in  a  Christian  dress.  Of  the  elements  of  the  teaching 
of  Jesus  he  was  not  less  ignorant  than  the  Red  Indians 
of  America.  He  never  had  obtained  a  glimpse  of  his 
own  heart.  He  never  had  an  instant’s  comprehension  of 
the  chaos  of  his  mind.  Half-an-hour  with  Socrates 
might  have  made  him  an  honest  man — a  Christian  or  an 
atheist ;  as  it  was,  following  a  path  which  led  to  the  anti¬ 
podes  of  the  world  in  which  Jesus  lived,  he  called  himself 
a  Christian  and  never  knew  that  this  profession  was 
absurd. 

If  England  recovered  her  political  liberties,  and  if 
she  became  a  force  of  enormous  moral  power  in  the  evo¬ 
lution  of  civilised  Europe,  it  was  because,  unknown  to 
the  King,  there  was  a  spiritual  discontent  among  the 
most  enlightened  of  his  people  which  could  not  be  satis- 


122 


SEVEN  AGES 


fied  either  by  freedom  from  the  interfering  tyranny  of 
Rome  or  by  the  increasing  prosperity  of  England’s 
materialism.  Of  this  spirit  the  King  knew  little:  what 
he  did  know  of  it  inspired  him  to  stamp  it  out.  And  in 
the  political  confusion  of  Europe  this  spiritual  movement 
was  so  insignificant  a  force  that  it  has  been  overlooked 
by  many  historians  of  the  Renaissance. 

Erasmus,  who  is  said  to  have  laid  the  egg  which 
Luther  hatched,  had  a  truer  notion  than  Henry  of  the 
forces  then  at  work  in  human  life;  but  even  he  did 
not  perfectly  realise  that  the  cry  of  man’s  spirit  which 
had  to  be  answered  in  those  critical  years  was  one  born 
of  hunger  and  thirst  for  spiritual  reality.  He  believed 
that  a  reform  in  the  manners  and  morals  of  monks, 
bishops,  and  clergy  would  pacify  political  unrest,  and  he 
looked  to  education  to  effect  gradually  and  peacefully 
those  reforms  in  Christian  theology  which  were  so  pal¬ 
pably  essential  to  intellectual  honesty  in  the  eyes  of 
scholars. 

Few  men  of  that  time  are  nearer  to  us  than  this 
little,  delicate,  and  witty  author  from  “Beer  and 
Butterland,”  as  he  himself  called  his  country  of 
Holland.  We  responded  at  once  to  his  good  humour, 
we  admire  with  relish  his  caustic  irony  and  his  piercing 
satire,  we  perfectly  agree  with  him  that  fanatics  are 
troublesome  people,  and  like  him,  we  are  all  convinced 
that  intellect  is  a  force  in  evolution  which  may  be  trusted 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


123 


to  achieve,  without  political  violence  and  without  eco¬ 
nomic  disturbance,  a  more  rational  world  order. 

But  a  study  of  his  works  constrains  an  honest  mind 
to  the  conclusion  that  with  all  his  quickness  of  observa¬ 
tion,  with  all  his  penetrating  good  sense,  and  with  all 
his  contempt  for  clerical  superstition,  he  himself  never 
once  experienced  that  passionate  aspiration  after  spiritual 
perfection  which  was  in  truth  the  hidden  leaven  of  the 
Renaissance.  A  certain  coarseness  mars  his  work,  even 
a  touch  of  salaciousness,  and  the  more  one  studies  him 
the  more  one  is  conscious  of  a  great  gulf  fixed  between  his 
vivacious  spirit  and  the  austere  souls  of  men  like  Wy- 
cliffe,  Milton,  and  Wesley — Wycliffe  who  was  the  Morn¬ 
ing  Star  of  the  Reformation,  Milton  who  was  the 
trumpet-voice  of  its  moral  victory,  and  Wesley  who  was 
almost  the  discoverer  of  its  true  spiritual  purpose. 

But  if  Erasmus  lacked  the  moral  purity  and  the 
spiritual  power  of  these  Englishmen,  if  he  was  lacking 
in  majesty  of  mind,  and  possessed  none  of  those  heroic 
qualities  which  endear  the  greatest  of  men  to  a  grateful 
posterity,  nevertheless  he  contributed  to  the  progress 
of  the  world  an  impulse  of  inexpressible  value.  In  him 
learning  was  seen  as  a  passion.  He  brought  to  the 
laborious  life  of  the  scholar,  not  only  great  talents,  but  a 
rejoicing  love.  From  him  men  caught  a  new  enthusiasm 
for  the  freshly  discovered  works  of  antiquity  and  a  new 
faith  in  the  power  of  the  human  mind  to  read  the  riddle 
of  existence.  He  was  the  living  soul  of  Europe’s 


124 


SEVEN  AGES 


humanism,  the  inspiration  of  a  culture  destined  to  revo¬ 
lutionise  the  world,  and  he  is  near  to  us,  and  dear  to  us, 
because  with  all  his  vast  learning  he  never  became  either 
a  pedant  or  a  dilettante.  One  may  say  that  his  curious 
and  delightful  spirit  can  be  seen  in  all  the  most  lovable 
of  English  essayists  from  Roger  Ascham  to  Charles 
Lamb. 

The  story  of  his  life  is  sooner  told  than  the  story  of 
his  influence.  Born  in  Rotterdam  on  the  28th  October, 
1467,  possibly  out  of  wedlock,  he  was  orphaned  of  both 
parents  just  after  entering  his  teens,  and  fell  into  the 
hands  of  a  guardian  who  first  robbed  him  of  his  inher¬ 
itance  and  then  smuggled  him  into  a  monastery.  At  the 
age  of  twenty-three,  awaking  to  the  moral  corruption  of 
his  life,  and  hungering  after  the  knowledge  which  was 
denied  him,  he  ended  his  probationship  as  an  Augustinian 
monk,  became  secretary  to  a  bishop,  and  afterwards  was 
ordained  a  priest.  From  this  time  onward  his  life  was  one 
of  many  journeys  and  continual  authorship.  His  first 
works  brought  him  such  fame  that  kings  implored  him 
to  come  to  their  courts,  and  universities  begged  the 
honour  of  numbering  him  among  their  teachers.  He 
travelled  widely,  made  friends  everywhere,  was  some¬ 
thing  of  a  “sponge”  in  money  affairs,  but  was  incor¬ 
ruptible  in  his  intellectual  life.  He  refused  many  honours 
which  he  deemed  dangerous  to  his  liberty  of  mind,  and 
he  protested  against  wars  which  self-interest  might  have 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


125 


induced  a  less  scrupulous  man  to  condone.  To  the  last 
he  remained  faithful  to  the  dream  of  Augustine.  When 
his  satires  on  the  Church  delighted  Luther  he  was  pleased, 
but  when  Luther,  instigated  by  these  satires,  took  action 
against  this  derided  Church  he  was  at  first  alarmed  and 
afterwards  angered.  He  had  satirised  celibacy,  and  now 
he  satirised  the  haste  with  which  Lutheran  monks  got 
married.  Lie  had  ridiculed  all  the  practices  of  the 
Church — indulgences,  saint  worship,  fasts,  and  super¬ 
stitious  ceremonial :  and  now  he  became  a  champion 
of  a  Church  which  stuck  to  these  matters  and  was  ready 
to  burn  those  who  assailed  them.  In  the  end,  hated  and 
distrusted  on  both  sides,  he  died  without  confession  and 
without  absolution  on  the  12th  July,  1536,  in  his  seven¬ 
tieth  year,  the  last  words  on  his  lips  being  the  whispered 
adoration,  “Lieber  Gott!” 

“To  Erasmus,”  says  Froude,  “religion  was  a  rule 
of  life,  a  perpetual  reminder  to  mankind  of  their  re¬ 
sponsibility  to  their  Maker,  a  spiritual  authority  under 
which  individuals  could  learn  their  duties  to  God  and  to 
their  neighbours.  Definitions  on  mysterious  subjects 
which  could  not  be  understood  were  the  growth  of  intel¬ 
lectual  vanity.  The  hope  of  his  life  had  been  to  see  the 
dogmatic  system  slackened,  the  articles  essential  to  be 
believed  reduced  to  the  Apostles’  Creed,  the  declaration 
that  God  was  a  reality,  and  the  future  judgment  a  fact 
and  a  certainty.  On  all  else  he  wished  to  see  opinion 


126 


SEVEN  AGES 


free.  The  name  of  heresy  was  a  terror,  but  so  long  as 
the  Church  abstained  from  deciding  there  could  be  no 
heresy.” 

When  Leo  X  sought  to  divert  Europe  from  the  turbu¬ 
lence  of  Luther  by  a  war  against  the  Turks,  Erasmus 
exclaimed,  ‘‘The  poor  Turk!”  He  hated  war  and  loathed 
hypocrisy : 

“I  wonder  what  the  Turks  will  think  when  they  hear 
about  instances  and  causes  formative ,  about  quiddities 
and  relativities ,  and  see  our  own  theologians  cursing  and 
spitting  at  each  other,  the  preaching  friars  crying  up  their 
St.  Thomas,  the  Minorites  their  Doctor  Seraphicus,  the 
Nominalists  and  Realists  wrangling  about  the  nature  of 
the  Second  Person  of  the  Trinity  as  if  Christ  was  a 
malignant  demon  ready  to  destroy  you  if  you  made  a 
mistake  about  His  Nature. 

“While  our  lives  and  manners  remain  as  depraved  as 
they  now  are  the  Turks  will  see  in  us  but  so  many 
rapacious  and  licentious  vermin.  How  are  we  to  make 
the  Turks  believe  in  Christ  till  we  show  that  we  believe 
in  Him  ourselves?  Reduce  the  Articles  of  Faith  to  the 
fewest  and  simplest — Quae  pertinent  ad  fidem  quam 
paucissimis  articulis  absolvantur.  Show  them  that 
Christ’s  yoke  is  easy,  and  that  we  are  shepherds  and  not 
robbers,  and  do  not  mean  to  oppress  them.  .  .  . 

“But  oh !  what  an  age  we  live  in.  When  were  morals 
more  corrupt? — ritual  and  ceremony  walking  hand  in 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


127 


hand  with  vice,  and  wretched  mortals  caring  only  to 
fill  their  purses.  Christ  cannot  be  taught  even  among 
Christians.  The  cry  is  only  for  pardons,  dispensations, 
and  indulgences,  and  the  trade  goes  on  in  the  name 
of  popes  and  princes,  or  even  of  Christ  Himself/’ 

He  was  for  ever  seeking  to  simplify  theology,  and 
his  best  excuse  for  withstanding  Luther  was  his  dread 
of  a  Protestant  theology  as  hard,  absurd,  and  intolerant 
as  that  of  the  Roman  Church. 

“May  not  a  man  be  a  Christian  who  cannot  explain 
philosophically  how  the  nativity  of  the  Son  differs  from 
the  procession  of  the  Holy  Spirit?  .  .  .  The  sum  of 
religion  is  peace,  which  can  only  be  when  definitions  are 
as  few  as  possible,  and  opinion  is  left  free  on  many  sub¬ 
jects.  Our  present  problems  are  said  to  be  waiting  for 
the  next  (Ecumenical  Council.  Better  let  them  wait  till 
the  veil  is  removed  and  we  see  God  face  to  face.” 

He  has  glimpses  of  what  is  necessary  to  salvation: 

“See  what  the  world  is  coming  to — rapine,  murder, 
plague,  famine,  rebellion ;  no  one  trying  to  mend  his  own 
life.” 

And  again : 

“All  grows  wilder  and  wilder.  Men  talk  of  heresy 
and  orthodoxy,  of  Antichrists  and  Catholics,  but  none 
speaks  of  Christ.  The  world  is  in  labour.  Good  may 


128 


SEVEN  AGES 


come  if  Christ  directs  the  birth.  There  is  no  hope  else. 
Paganism  comes  to  life  again;  Pharisees  fight  against 
the  gospel ;  in  such  a  monstrous  tempest  we  need  skilful 
pilots.  Christ  has  been  sleeping  so  far.  I  trust  the 
prayers  of  the  faithful  will  wake  Him.  He  may  then 
command  sea  and  waves,  and  they  will  obey  Him.  The 
monks  have  howled.  The  theologians  have  made  articles 
of  belief.  We  have  had  prisons,  informations,  bulls,  and 
burnings;  and  what  has  come  of  them?  Outcries  enough; 
but  no  crying  to  Christ.  Christ  will  not  wake  till  we 
call  to  Him  in  sincerity  of  heart.  Then  he  will  arise  and 
bid  the  sea  be  still,  and  there  will  be  a  great  calm/’ 

Plere  we  may  see  that  Erasmus  discerned  the  true 
nature  of  the  sickness  which  had  fallen  upon  mankind 
— “no  one  trying  to  mend  his  own  life” — and  had 
glimpses  of  the  sole  remedy  for  this  lamentable  condi¬ 
tion  of  the  world — “Christ  will  not  wake  till  we  call  to 
Him  in  sincerity  of  heart.”  But  we  may  be  pardoned  for 
supposing  that  he  himself  had  not  deeply  entered  into 
the  secret  of  Jesus,  and  could  not  easily  have  lifted  the 
burden  of  a  fellow-man  who  came  to  him  in  any  deep 
distress  of  soul,  although  to  liken  him,  as  M.  Jusserand 
has  done,  to  Voltaire  is  surely  an  exaggeration  which 
takes  away  the  breath. 

We  may  doubt  whether  Erasmus  fully  realised  that 
the  greatness  of  his  work  lay  altogether  outside  his 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


129 


painful  efforts  to  save  theology  from  self-destruction. 
To  us,  looking  back  to  that  stormy  dawn  of  a  new  epoch 
in  human  life,  it  is  manifest  that  he  was  helping  to 
determine  the  character  of  European  civilisation  chiefly 
by  his  instructed  enthusiasm  for  the  culture  of  Greece 
and  Rome. 

Life  had  discovered  that  it  was  travelling  in  the  direc¬ 
tion  of  a  cul-de-sac.  By  a  violent  effort  it  attempted  to 
throw  off  the  impulse  which  was  driving  it  to  that  form 
of  suicide.  In  the  reaction  which  followed  there  was  a 
confusion  of  mind  which  threatened  moral  death.  Men 
who  had  ceased  to  believe  in  God  pretended  that  they 
believed  in  the  gods.  There  was  an  intellectual  affecta¬ 
tion  all  over  Europe,  even  in  England,  which  was  as  fatal 
to  progress  as  it  was  to  honesty.  Many  Englishmen  be¬ 
came  Frenchified,  and  would  even  tie  their  shoestrings 
in  French  fashion.  The  English  language,  which  Wy- 
cliffe  had  made  so  splendid  a  power,  had  to  be  cham¬ 
pioned  by  Sir  John  Cheke,  professor  of  Greek  at 
Cambridge.  Everywhere  there  was  a  disposition  towards 
dilettantism.  Thanks  to  Erasmus,  and  thanks  to  More 
and  Colet  whom  he  inspired,  the  humanists  of  England 
resisted  this  false  impulse  and  stubbornly  sought  in 
knowledge  for  moral  and  intellectual  power. 

Once  more  the  spirit  of  Socrates  and  the  spirit  of 
Plato  came  to  the  rescue  of  a  Church  which  had  ceased 
to  be  Christian  and  was  fast  falling  back  into  the  super¬ 
stitious  futilities  and  the  moral  obliquities  of  pagan 


13° 


SEVEN  AGES 


creeds.  Once  more  humanity  made  up  its  mind  to  throw 
off  the  shameful  spells  of  necromancy.  A  fresh  start 
was  to  be  made  by  the  human  mind,  after  more  than  a 
thousand  years  of  vain  effort  to  materialise  the  dream  of 
St.  Augustine. 

On  the  6th  May,  1527,  nine  years  before  the  death  of 
Erasmus,  Christian  soldiers  from  Italy,  Spain,  and  Ger¬ 
many  poured  into  the  Holy  City  of  Rome,  and  there 
committed  outrages  against  virtue  and  religion  which 
would  have  disgusted  the  Arian  warriors  of  Alaric  in  the 
fifth  century.  “The  Pope,”  says  Mr.  A.  F.  Pollard  in 
his  monograph  on  Henry  VIII,  “again  fled  to  the  castle 
of  St.  Angelo;  and  for  weeks  Rome  endured  an  orgy  of 
sacrilege,  blasphemy,  robbery,  murder,  and  lust,  the  hor¬ 
rors  of  which  no  brush  could  depict  nor  tongue  recite.” 

“All  the  churches  and  the  monasteries,”  says  a 
cardinal  who  was  present,  “both  of  friars  and  nuns,  were 
sacked.  Many  friars  were  beheaded,  even  priests  at  the 
altar;  many  old  nuns  were  beaten  with  sticks;  many 
young  ones  were  violated,  robbed,  and  made  prisoners; 
all  the  vestments,  chalices,  silver,  were  taken  from  the 
churches.  .  .  .  Cardinals,  bishops,  friars,  priests,  old 
nuns,  infants,  pages  and  servants — the  very  poorest — 
were  tormented  with  unheard-of  cruelties — the  son  in  the 
presence  of  his  father,  the  babe  in  the  sight  of  its  mother. 
All  the  registers  and  documents  of  the  Camera  Apostolica 
were  sacked,  torn  in  pieces,  and  partly  burnt.” 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS  13 1 

“Having  entered,”  writes  an  imperialist  to  Charles, 
“our  men  sacked  the  whole  Borgo  and  killed  almost 
everyone  they  found.  .  .  .  All  the  monasteries  were 
rifled,  and  the  ladies  who  had  taken  refuge  in  them 
carried  off.  Every  person  was  compelled  by  torture 
to  pay  a  ransom  .  .  .  the  ornaments  of  all  the  churches 
were  pillaged  and  the  relics  and  other  things  thrown  into 
the  sinks  and  cess-pools.  Even  the  holy  places  were 
sacked.  The  Church  of  St.  Peter  and  the  papal  palace, 
from  the  basement  to  the  top,  were  turned  into  stables 
for  horses.  .  . 

Thus  vanished  for  many  centuries  the  hope  of 
Augustine.  Europe,  broken  up  into  warring  nations, 
and  committed  to  the  unsatisfying  lusts  of  materialism 
and  with  two  rival  Churches  contending  for  her  soul 
by  fighting  each  other  with  weapons  from  the  armoury 
of  conspiracy  and  assassination,  set  about  the  perilous 
work  of  political  reconstruction  and  moral  progress  with 
only  the  new  learning  to  save  her  from  a  catastrophic 
reversion  to  barbarism. 

It  is  important  to  recall  the  darkness  and  distraction 
of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  to  remind  ourselves  that 
the  Renaissance  broke  over  Europe  like  a  storm,  that  it 
did  not  arise,  like  the  sun  of  righteousness  with  healing 
in  its  wings,  that  it  was  a  time  of  infinite  foreboding 
and  the  most  direful  distresses,  and  that  if  superstition 


1 32 


SEVEN  AGES 


perished  in  the  universal  contempt  of  mankind  for  a 
Church  which  had  become  a  blasphemy,  nevertheless 
materialism  was  born  again  in  the  revival  of  learning. 

We  are  too  apt  to  think  of  the  Renaissance  as  a  beau¬ 
tiful  dawn,  a  dawn  of  ecstasy,  tender  with  serenity, 
gracious  with  freshness,  and  exulting  with  hope,  a  rosy- 
fingered  dawn  opening  to  the  ravished  eyes  of  mankind 
the  gates  of  a  new  and  most  enchanting  Paradise.  We 
think  of  Caxton  translating  into  “our  maternal  English 
tongue”  works  of  Cicero,  Ovid,  and  Virgil;  we  think  of 
the  four  printing-presses  in  England,  Westminster,  Lon¬ 
don,1  Oxford,  and  St.  Albans,  where  the  new  “ars  scri- 
bendi  artificialiter”  was  practised  to  the  astonishment  of 
all  men;  we  think  of  Wolsey’s  great  palace  of  Hampton 
Court,  of  his  school  at  Ipswich,  of  his  college  at  Oxford; 
we  think  of  Columbus  discovering  islands  “of  great 
beauty  and  of  a  thousand  shapes,  easy  of  access,  covered 
with  trees  of  a  thousand  kinds,  so  high  that  they  seemed 
to  reach  into  the  sky” ;  we  think  of  the  two  Cabots  and 
Magellan,  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci  and  Michael  Angelo,  of 
Copernicus  and  Roger  Ascham,  of  Sir  Thomas  Elyot 
and  Leland,  of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  and  Drake,  of  Shake¬ 
speare  and  Ben  jonson,  of  Bacon  and  Montaigne. 

We  forget  the  plague,  which  first  came  to  England 
in  the  dawn  of  the  Renaissance.  We  forget  the  con¬ 
stant  “robberies,  rapes,  massacres,  and  conflagrations.” 

1The  printing-press  in  London,  St.  Paul’s,  was  sometimes  called 
Eastminster  to  distinguish  it  from  Westminster. 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


133 


We  forget  the  72,000  persons  executed  during  the  reign 

of  Henry  VIII.  We  forget  the  sheep  which  ate  men — 
the  arable  land  turned  down  to  pasture,  the  depopulation 
of  villages,  the  ruin  of  the  English  peasantry.  We  for¬ 
get  the  poverty  of  the  people;  many  scholars  at  Cam¬ 
bridge  “dined  on  pottage  made  of  a  farthing’s  worth  of 
beef  with  a  little  salt  and  oatmeal,  and  literally  nothing 
else” :  the  working-classes  never  ate  wheaten  bread,  and 
in  times  of  dearth  made  their  bread  either  of  “beanes, 
peason,  or  otes,  or  of  altogether,  and  some  acornes 
among.”  We  also  forget  the  general  degradation  of 
English  manhood,  its  servility  to  the  King,  its  base  con¬ 
tentment  with  the  occupations  of  commerce,  its  low 
standard  of  morals,  its  obsequious  attitude  to  wealth,  its 
loss  of  all  sense  of  honour.  In  a  word,  we  forget  that 
the  apostles  of  the  new  learning  were  but  a  little  hand¬ 
ful  of  mankind  in  a  kingdom  of  the  grossest  ignorance 
and  the  most  miserable  immorality. 

That  Erasmus  missed  the  true  meaning  of  the  world’s 
unrest  does  not  diminish  the  greatness  of  his  achieve¬ 
ment.  More  than  any  man  of  his  time  he  steadied  the 
passions  of  Europe  and  directed  the  steps  of  humanity 
into  a  way  which  led,  if  not  to  spiritual  illumination,  at 
least  away  from  the  dullness  of  materialism.  He  was  a 
light  in  the  darkness,  and  a  calming  voice  in  the  midst  of 
the  storm.  His  sharp  wit  and  his  generous  good  humour 
were  tranquillising  forces,  and  his  great  learning  worked 


134 


SEVEN  AGES 


all  the  more  effectually  for  the  salvation  of  the  world 
because  it  was  never  out  of  the  keeping  of  his  rich 
humanity. 

He  brought  no  peace  to  the  Church,  but  he  brought 
a  more  profitable  controversy  into  the  life  of  the  world, 
and  set  the  mind  of  mankind  speculating  in  a  region 
less  barren  of  harvest  than  the  charred  and  blackened 
field  of  theology.  From  his  influence  came  to  Europe 
the  peaceful  duel  between  idealism  and  materialism.  Be¬ 
cause  of  him  intellect  has  roused  itself  to  confront  the 
greatest  of  all  philosophical  questions.  And  largely  be¬ 
cause  of  his  charming  wit,  his  humaneness,  and  his  noble 
liberalism,  the  long  contention  between  those  who  follow 
Plato  and  those  who  follow  Aristotle  has  never  been 
disgraced  by  the  intemperance  which  still  outlaws  theo¬ 
logy  from  the  attention  of  average  men. 

“May  Christ’s  dove  come  among  us,  or  else  Minerva’s 
owl,”  he  wrote  to  the  Duke  of  Saxony  in  1524. 

The  dove  was  not  destined  to  appear,  but  the  owl 
had  already  beaten  its  soft  wings  through  the  darkness 
of  that  troubled  night.  Happily  for  England  there 
existed  at  that  time  men  whose  enthusiasm  for  learn¬ 
ing,  and  whose  almost  ecstatic  joy  in  the  discovery  of 
Greek  culture,  came  second  to  their  profound  realisa¬ 
tion  of  man  as  a  creature  carrying  the  fortunes  of  God 
on  this  planet.  Such  a  man  was  Sir  Thomas  More,  “the 
man  of  every  hour,”  as  Erasmus  called  him,  who  was 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


135 


a  Christian  socialist,  a  prison  reformer,  an  opponent  of 
blood  sports,  and  a  bold  champion  of  the  poor  against 
the  despoiling  hand  of  the  powerful  and  the  rich.  He 
was  so  far  in  advance  of  his  time  that  he  would  have 
permitted  suicide  to  those  hopelessly  suffering,  a  divorce 
to  those  hopelessly  married.  Brave  enough  to  jest  on 
the  scaffold,  he  was  a  man  who  shrank  from  pain  and 
abhorred  cruelty.  “How  can  nature,”  he  asks  those  who 
believe  in  mortifications,  “which  orders  you  to  be  kind 
and  good  to  others,  command  you  to  be  harsh  and  cruel 
to  yourself?  Nature  herself  enjoins  on  us  to  lead  a 
happy  life.”  He  had  all  the  Greek  feeling  for  beauty  and 
tenderness,  all  the  Roman  regard  for  courage  and  moral 
dignity,  but  not  quite  all  the  sweetness,  graciousness,  and 
compassion  of  the  Christian. 

Like  to  him  in  many  ways  was  Colet,  Dean  of  St. 
Paul’s.  Perhaps  it  is  not  an  exaggeration  to  say  that 
we  may  now  see  in  Colet  more  even  than  in  the  illus¬ 
trious  Erasmus  the  true  workings  of  evolution  at  the 
time  of  the  Renaissance.  The  story  should  be  well  known 
how  he  preached  against  a  war  with  France  and  how  the 
Bishop  of  London  strove  to  undo  him  in  the  King’s 
favour,  and  how  Henry  sent  for  him  to  preach  before 
the  Court  and  how  Colet  “went  boldly  at  the  dangerous 
subject.” 

“He  preached,”  says  Froude,  “on  the  victory  of 
Christ,  spoke  of  fighting  as  a  savage  business,  intimated 
that  it  was  not  charity  to  plunge  a  sword  into  another 


136 


SEVEN  AGES 


man’s  bowels — that  it  would  be  better  to  imitate  Christ 
than  to  imitate  popes  like  Alexander  or  Julius.” 

The  King  afterwards  took  him  for  a  walk  in  the  garden 
and  for  an  hour  and  a  half  the  two  men  were  together, 
his  enemies  thinking  that  now  surely  the  Dean  was  un¬ 
done.  But  at  the  end  of  that  conversation  the  King  sent 
for  a  cup  of  wine,  embraced  Colet,  and  pledging  him 
with  the  wine,  called  out  to  the  courtiers  who  were 
gathered  there,  “Let  every  man  choose  his  own  Doctor. 
Dean  Colet  shall  be  mine.” 

Erasmus,  who  helped  Colet  to  establish  St.  Paul’s 
School,  has  acknowledged  the  greatness  of  his  moral 
character.  He  saw  in  him  the  characteristic  good  English¬ 
man,  the  scholar  who  was  not  a  pedagogue,  the  gentleman 
who  was  not  a  boor,  and  the  Christian  who  was  neither 
a  fanatic  nor  a  hypocrite.  He  has  given  us  a  sketch  of 
Colet  which  will  live  when  many  of  his  controversial 
writings  are  forgotten,  and  in  that  sketch,  if  it  be  care¬ 
fully  read,  one  may  see  how  it  was  that  the  Renais¬ 
sance  in  England  kept  a  firm  hold  of  moral  princi¬ 
ples  in  the  heady  hour  of  freedom  from  a  tyrannical 
clericalism. 

I  will  quote  a  few  passages  from  this  sketch  of  Dean 

Colet  as  it  appears  in  Froude’s  Life  and  Letters  of 
Erasmus: 

“He  was  a  man  of  genuine  piety.  He  was  not  born 
with  it.  He  was  naturally  hot,  impetuous,  and  resent- 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


137 


ful — indolent,  fond  of  pleasure  and  of  women’s  society 
— disposed  to  make  a  joke  of  everything.  He  told 
me  that  he  had  fought  against  his  faults  with  study, 
fasting,  and  prayer,  and  thus  his  whole  life  was,  in 
fact,  unpolluted  with  the  world’s  defilements.  His  money 
he  gave  to  all  pious  uses,  worked  incessantly,  talked  al¬ 
ways  on  serious  subjects  to  conquer  his  disposition  to 
levity,  not  but  what  you  could  see  traces  of  the  old  Adam 
when  wit  was  flying  at  feast  or  festival.  He  avoided 
large  parties  for  this  reason.  He  dined  on  a  single  dish, 
with  a  draught  or  two  of  light  ale.  He  liked  good  wine, 
but  abstained  on  principle.  I  never  knew  a  man  of  sun¬ 
nier  nature.  No  one  ever  more  enjoyed  cultivated 
society;  but  here,  too,  he  denied  himself,  and  was  always 
thinking  of  the  life  to  come.  .  .  . 

“He  had  a  bad  opinion  of  the  monasteries  falsely 
so-called.  He  gave  them  little  and  left  them  nothing. 
He  said  that  morality  was  always  purer  among  married 
laymen,  and  yet,  though  himself  absolutely  chaste,  he 
was  not  very  hard  on  priests  and  monks  who  only  sinned 
with  women.  He  did  not  make  light  of  impurity,  but 
he  thought  it  less  criminal  than  spite  and  malice  and  envy 
and  vanity  and  ignorance.  The  loose  sort  were  at  least 
made  human  and  modest  by  their  very  faults,  and  he  re¬ 
garded  avarice  and  arrogance  as  blacker  sins  in  a  priest 
than  a  hundred  concubines. 

“He  had  a  particular  dislike  of  bishops.  He  said  they 
were  more  like  wolves  than  shepherds.  They  sold  the 
sacraments,  sold  their  ceremonies  and  absolutions.  They 
were  slaves  of  vanity  and  avarice.  He  did  not  much 
blame  those  who  doubted  whether  a  wicked  priest  could 
convey  sacramental  grace,  and  was  indignant  that  there 


i3§ 


SEVEN  AGES 


were  so  many  of  them  as  to  force  the  question  to  be 
raised. 

“He  disapproved  of  the  great  educational  institutions 
in  England.  He  thought  they  encouraged  idleness.  As 
little  did  he  like  the  public  schools.  Education  was  spoilt, 
he  said,  when  the  lessons  learnt  were  turned  to  worldly 
account  and  made  the  means  of  getting  on.  He  was  him¬ 
self  learned,  but  he  had  no  respect  for  a  mass  of  in¬ 
formation  gathered  out  of  a  multitude  of  books.  Such 
laborious  wisdom,  he  said,  was  fatal  to  sound  knowledge 
and  right  feeling.  He  approved  of  a  fine  ritual  at  church, 
but  he  saw  no  reason  why  priests  should  be  always  mut¬ 
tering  prayers  at  home  or  on  their  walks.  He  admitted 
privately  that  many  things  were  generally  taught  which 
he  did  not  believe,  but  he  would  not  create  scandal  by 
blurting  out  his  objections.  No  book  could  be  so  heretical 
but  he  would  read  it,  and  read  it  carefully.  He  learnt 
more  from  such  books  than  he  learnt  from  dogmatism 
and  interested  orthodoxy.” 


It  was  because  England  numbered  among  the  King’s 
subjects  men  of  this  stature,  men  in  whom  we  may  dis¬ 
cern  the  continuity  of  Wycliffe  and  the  foreshadowing 
of  Milton,  that  England’s  Renaissance  did  not  end  with 
the  Italianate  Englishman  of  Elizabethan  times,  but 
came  ultimately  to  be  a  palingenesis  of  the  moral  con¬ 
science. 

Wolsey  and  Thomas  Cromwell,  Howard  and  Sey¬ 
mour,  Leland  and  Linacre,  Skelton  and  Wyatt,  these  and 
many  other  illustrious  persons,  still  keep  their  unfading 


THE  AGE  OF  ERASMUS 


139 


places  in  the  rich  tapestry  of  the  English  Renaissance; 
but  the  living  spirit  of  Colet  and  the  living  spirit  of  More 
are  even  now  in  the  midst  of  the  English-speaking  na¬ 
tions  of  the  world,  still  wrestling  with  us  for  a  fulfilment 
of  their  aims,  still  rebuking  us  when,  forgetful  of  the 
long  and  suffering  evolution  of  mankind,  we  surrender 
either  to  the  selfish  vulgarities  of  materialism  or  to  the 
bewitchments  of  a  learning  which  strikes  no  roots  into 
the  heroic  past  and  stretches  no  branches  into  the  ful¬ 
filling  future. 

These  men  are  not  historic  figures  to  which  we  look 
back  with  interest  or  amusement.  They  are  our  con¬ 
temporaries.  They  walk  with  us  to  the  future,  not 
abreast  of  us,  but  ahead  of  us.  Evolution  accounts  for 
them  as  the  effort  of  life  to  throw  forward  to  its  con¬ 
summation.  Religion  explains  them  as  men  sent  from 
heaven — men  so  spiritually  endowed  as  to  be  able  to 
respond  to  those  inspirations  of  the  Infinite  which  the 
good  in  all  ages  have  believed  are  the  providence  of  God. 

Wonderful  is  the  vitality  of  goodness.  In  some  re¬ 
spects  the  sixteenth  century  in  England  was  as  full  of 
brutality  and  terrorism  as  the  seventeenth  century  in 
France.  In  some  respects  it  was  more  hopeless  than  any 
period  in  man’s  history  since  the  fall  of  Rome  in  the 
fifth  century.  And  yet  because  a  few  men  in  that  age 
kept  faith  with  virtue,  the  English  Renaissance  gave 
birth  to  a  civilisation  which  has  worked  on  the  whole  for 
the  freedom  and  happiness  of  the  human  mind.  The 


140 


SEVEN  AGES 


realism  of  Socrates,  the  courage  of  Aristotle,  and  the 
beauty  of  Jesus  revived  in  those  few  men,  and  began  once 
more  their  work  on  the  heart  of  pilgrim  man — “a  crea¬ 
ture,”  says  Grotius,  “most  dear  to  God.” 


CHAPTER  VI 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 
(1599-1658) 


CHAPTER  VI 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 
(1599-1658) 

That  a  man  may  think  what  he  chooses  to  think  ap¬ 
pears  to  us  as  the  first  clause  in  the  charter  of  liberty. 
That  he  could,  indeed,  think  anything  else  seems  to  us 
a  very  great  absurdity  on  the  part  of  those  who  suppose 
it. 

What  Bayle  calls  “a  ludicrous  turn  by  a  masterly  hand” 
is  given  to  the  idea  of  submitting  the  reason  to  authority 
by  St.  Evremond  in  his  Conversation  between  Marechal 
Hocquincourt  and  Father  Canaye.  It  is  worth  quoting: 

“  ‘The  devil  take  me  if  I  believed  a  syllable  then/  said 
the  Marechal  Hocquincourt;  ‘but  ever  since  I  could  en¬ 
dure  to  be  crucified  for  religion.  Not  that  I  see  more 
reason  in  it  now ;  but,  on  the  contrary,  less  than  ever : 
but  for  all  that  I  could  suffer  myself  to  be  crucified,  with¬ 
out  knowing  why,  or  wherefore.’ 

“  ‘So  much  the  better,  my  lord/  replied  the  Father, 
twanging  it  devoutly  through  the  nose,  ‘so  much  the 
better;  these  are  not  human  motions;  they  proceed  from 


143 


144 


SEVEN  AGES 


God.  No  reason!  That  is  the  true  religion:  No  reason. 
What  an  extraordinary  grace,  my  lord,  has  heaven 
bestowed  upon  you!  Estote  sicut  infantes ,  be  ye  as 
children:  children  have  still  their  innocence,  and  why? 
Because  they  have  no  reason.  Beati  pamper es  spiritu, 
Blessed  are  the  poor  in  spirit ;  they  sin  not ;  the  reason  is 
because  they  have  no  reason.  No  reason :  without  know¬ 
ing  why  or  wherefore :  Oh  excellent  words !  They  ought 
to  be  written  in  golden  letters.  Not  that  I  see  more  reason 
in  it  now;  but ,  on  the  contrary,  less  than  ever.  In  truth 
this  is  divine  for  them  that  have  any  taste  of  heavenly 
things:  No  reason.  What  an  extraordinary  grace,  my 
lord,  has  God  bestowed  upon  you !’  ” 

But  not  only  to  Henry  the  Eighth,  Queen  Elizabeth, 
and  Charles  the  First  did  any  doctrine  of  free  thought 
seem  manifestly  subversive  of  all  order;  it  was  also 
objectionable  to  the  minds  of  Sir  Thomas  More,  Luther, 
Calvin,  and  the  leading  Presbyterians  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  If  the  Papists  burned  John  Huss,  the  Reform¬ 
ers  burned  Servetus.  No  page  in  the  biography  of  Sir 
Thomas  More  leaves  so  sad  a  memory  as  that  which 
records  his  approval  of  executing  heretics.  No  stain  on 
the  Reformation  is  so  deep  as  that  left  by  the  cruelty 
of  its  heroic  protagonists  towards  those  who  dared  to 
withstand  the  despotism  with  which  that  Reformation  at¬ 
tempted  to  supplant  the  despotism  of  Rome. 

The  history  of  our  own  days  should  prevent  us,  how¬ 
ever,  from  too  hasty  a  condemnation  of  those  who  in 
times  past  regarded  private  judgment  either  with  grave 


OLIVER  CROMWELL 

From  a  painting,  by  an  unknown  artist,  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery 


9 

. 

■ 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


145 


suspicion  or  a  fanatical  enmity.  The  bolshevist  in  Russia, 
the  gunman  in  Ireland,  the  communist  in  Italy,  the  non¬ 
co-operator  in  India,  the  plotting  monarchist  in  Germany, 
the  Red  advocate  of  Direct  Action  in  England,  suggest  to 
us  that  many  even  now  may  not  be  fit  to  enjoy  the  dan¬ 
gerous  blessing  of  free  thought. 

Perhaps  there  is  no  more  helpful  way  of  understand¬ 
ing  the  difficult  and  confusing  history  of  the  seventeenth 
century  than  by  thinking  of  it  in  terms  of  M.  Bergson’s 
picturesque  philosophy.  To  do  this  fruitfully  one  must 
first  summarise  to  oneself  the  history  of  evolution.  One 
must  think  of  Life  pushing  obstinate  matter  into  a  thou¬ 
sand  blind  alleys,  reaching  enormous  strength,  incredible 
swiftness,  marvellous  cunning,  beautiful  co-operation,  but 
finding  only  in  the  creature  Man  an  open  door  for  the 
hidden  purposes  of  creation.  One  must  discern  in  this 
strange  creature  qualities  which  entirely  differentiate  him 
from  all  other  creations  of  evolution — the  three  faculties 
of  speech,  music,  and  mathematics;  and  one  must  watch 
him  slowly  and  fearfully  forsaking  the  path  of  instinct 
for  the  yet  untrodden  ways  of  reason,  developing  within 
himself  the  power  of  reflection  and  the  rudiments  of  a 
conscience. 

One  must  see  the  family  extending  into  the  tribe,  and 
the  tribe  into  the  nation,  a  rude  morality,  a  rough  justice, 
a  dim  religion,  a  crude  science  shaping  everything.  One 
must  see  intelligence,  organisation,  and  idealism  gradually 


146 


SEVEN  AGES 


constructing  empires  of  great  glory,  great  power,  and 
great  promise,  but  empires  built  upon  the  slavery  of  mul¬ 
titudes  and  existing  only  for  the  gratification  of  the  few. 
One  must  see  these  empires  falling  into  decay  and  ruin, 
discarded  by  Life  on  its  journey  of  creation,  just  as  it 
discarded  the  mastodon  and  the  sabre-toothed  tiger.  One 
must  see  this  invisible  spirit  of  Life,  at  a  grave  crisis  in 
its  progress,  thrusting  the  Israelitish  slaves  of  Egypt  into 
the  wilderness,  there  to  worship  a  moral  God,  and  one 
must  see  these  former  slaves,  inspired  by  this  theory  of 
a  Power  in  the  universe  that  made  for  righteousness, 
building  up  a  civilisation  of  their  own  in  Palestine, 
founded  upon  a  moral  idea  infinitely  superior  to  the 
childish  superstitions  of  Egypt,  but  a  civilisation,  all  the 
same,  penetrated  by  the  deadly  corruption  of  materialism. 

One  must  see  in  Greece  the  ascent  of  Life  to  a  more 
comprehensive  philosophy,  which  apprehended  a  sublime 
Truth  and  an  incorruptible  Justice  behind  the  stage-play 
of  Olympian  deities.  One  must  listen  to  Socrates  talking 
of  the  God  without  and  the  God  within,  of  laws  which 
cannot  be  broken,  of  a  power  which  cannot  be  deceived, 
almost  as  Moses  and  the  first  Isaiah  had  spoken.  One 
must  see  Archimedes,  Aristotle,  Hippocrates,  and 
Ptolemy  examining  nature,  as  a  curious  problem  the  solu¬ 
tion  of  which  would  contribute  to  human  power — Life 
seeking  to  develop  reason  in  the  field  of  the  senses,  grap¬ 
pling  with  its  environment  in  a  new  way,  apart  from 
tradition  and  priestcraft.  And  one  must  see  a  bolder  and 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


147 


a  more  moral  people  conquering  these  brilliant  but 
quarrelsome  and  immoral  Greeks,  who  could  not  rise  to 
the  height  of  the  Socratic  simplicity;  and  one  must  watch 
this  great  Roman  people  overrunning  the  world,  absorb¬ 
ing  much  that  was  fine  and  true  and  elevating  in  Greek 
culture,  but  finally  sinking,  under  an  immense  burden  of 
prosperity,  into  a  moral  vileness  greater  than  ever  existed 
in  Athens  and  into  a  contemptible  superstition  more  de¬ 
structive  even  than  that  of  Egypt  in  the  days  of  the 
Pharaohs. 

Life  is  again  approaching  a  blank  wall.  Animalism  is 
again  dragging  reason  and  soul  back  to  the  paralysis  of 
the  instincts.  But  suddenly,  in  an  unexpected  place,  the 
open  door  is  found  for  Life’s  advance.  A  little  party  of 
men  in  Galilee,  descendants  of  the  Egyptian  slaves  who 
had  fled  from  their  masters  under  a  moral  compulsion, 
speak  once  more  of  a  Justice  which  cannot  be  bribed, 
of  a  Truth  which  cannot  be  hoodwinked,  of  a  Responsi¬ 
bility  which  cannot  be  shirked,  and  of  a  Beauty  which 
ought  to  be  desired;  speak  of  Spirit  as  the  one  abiding 
reality,  and  of  materialism  as  the  enemy  of  truth. 

Finally,  one  must  see  this  last  heroic  and  marvellously 
triumphant  attempt  of  Life  to  find  the  open  door  ulti¬ 
mately  frustrated  by  its  immemorial  enemy.  The  moral 
glory  of  the  Christian  empire,  a  far  more  exceeding 
glory  than  that  of  Egypt  or  Babylon,  Greece  or  Rome,  is 
overtaken  by  materialism :  the  saint  gives  place  to  the  dis¬ 
honest  priest,  the  devout  missionary  becomes  the  ecclesi- 


1 48 


SEVEN  AGES 


astical  statesman,  the  scholar  monk  becomes  the  sceptical 
dilettante  pope  :  once  more  superstition  invades  the  human 
mind,  once  more  European  progress  is  flung  back  to  the 
idolatries  of  Asia,  once  more  Life  finds  itself  in  a  blind 
alley.  Materialism  has  conquered. 

A  time  of  fresh  convulsion  for  mankind  is  now  mani¬ 
festly  at  hand.  If  we  forget  the  men  of  the  Reformation, 
their  names  and  stations,  and  think  of  Life  wildly  seek¬ 
ing  an  escape  from  its  blind  alley,  attempting  with  frenzy 
to  break  away  from  the  materialism  which  is  dragging  it 
back  to  the  bounded  prison  of  animal  instincts,  we  shall 
better  understand  what  was  to  come.  All  the  creative 
work  of  the  innumerable  years  of  evolution  was  in  peril. 
Life  must  find  a  fresh  outlet,  or  it  must  rush  backward  to 
its  beginnings.  Here  it  moved  resolutely  to  an  iron 
despotism;  there  it  swung  towards  an  untrammelled 
liberty;  and  elsewhere  it  sought  tentatively  a  thousand 
compromises,  a  thousand  pretexts  for  makeshifts  and 
patchwork,  afraid  to  lose  in  fresh  experiments  which 
might  lead  to  unreckoned  disasters,  what  it  had  already 
so  painfully,  so  heroically  achieved. 

The  whole  world  was  in  commotion.  When  the  first 
convulsion  was  passed  Life  found  itself  on  a  road 
hitherto  untrodden — the  road  of  liberty.  Alarm  over¬ 
took  it  before  it  had  advanced  to  the  first  mile-post  on 
that  new  road.  Even  those  who  had  been  foremost  in 
throwing  off  the  old  tyrannies  or  despotisms,  recoiled 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


149 


from  the  advance.  Who  could  trust  humanity  to  think 
for  itself  ? 

Who  could  name  a  final  authority  in  things  temporal? 
The  mind  of  Europe  was  arrested.  The  soul  of  man 
came  to  a  standstill.  Only  a  chosen  few  realised  that 
“there  is  no  epic  of  the  certainties,”  that  only  on  the  open 
road  of  faith  and  experiment  can  adventure  be  met 
worthy  to  shape  the  soul  of  man. 

In  the  early  years  of  the  seventeenth  century  Life  was 
marking  time,  uncertain  what  it  should  do.  So  far  as 
England  was  concerned  it  seemed  as  if  the  violence  of 
convulsion  had  exhausted  her,  and  that  she  no  longer  had 
any  signal  part  to  play  in  the  great  drama  of  creative 
evolution. 

The  huge  figure  of  Henry  the  Eighth  had  departed 
from  the  scene.  The  hot  and  imperious  spirit  of  Eliza¬ 
beth  no  longer  flamed  like  a  battle-flag  before  the  ad¬ 
vancing  fortunes  of  the  British  race.  On  the  throne  of 
these  British  Islands,  which  Milton  was  content  to  take 
for  his  world,  sat  an  elegant,  incompetent,  and  impecuni¬ 
ous  Scotsman,  Charles  the  First,  obsessed  by  the  idea 
that  he  must  conquer  the  Palatinate  for  his  nephew.  On 
the  surrounding  seas  lay  the  fever-ridden  wreckage  of 
that  gallant  and  unconquerable  English  Fleet  which,  in 
spite  of  the  penurious  Elizabeth,  Sir  Francis  Drake  had 
made  a  supreme  weapon  in  the  hand  of  evolution.  And 
in  the  dust  of  Europe,  a  thing  of  contempt  and  derision 


SEVEN  AGES 


150 

to  Richelieu,  lay  the  great  name  of  England,  great  no 
longer. 

Van  Dyck  is  responsible  for  much  bad  history. 
Charles  the  First  looks  into  the  eyes  of  mankind  with  so 
beautiful  an  innocence  and  so  charming  an  air  of  re¬ 
finement  that  many  find  it  difficult  to  think  of  that 
“comely  head”  containing  thoughts  which  were  fatal  to 
the  progress  of  the  human  race.  They  remind  themselves 
that  Cromwell  was  disfigured  by  warts  and  wore  red 
flannel  round  his  throat  when  he  went  to  church.  They 
tell  themselves  that  nothing  of  Cromwell’s  statesmanship 
remains,  and  little  of  his  religious  reformation.  They 
feel  that  they  are  nearer  to  the  elegant  and  gracious 
Charles,  who  at  least  knew  a  good  picture  from  a  bad 
one,  and  who  was  neither  Papist  nor  Puritan  but  a  com¬ 
promising  Arminian,  or  as  we  should  say  now  a  good 
Anglo-Catholic — nearer  to  this  handsome  and  sympathe¬ 
tic  King  than  to  his  psalm-singing  conqueror,  who  had 
some  connection  with  a  brewery,  was  Welsh  by  descent, 
like  the  Tudors,  and  whose  real  name  was  Williams. 

But  Van  Dyck’s  flattering  portraits  of  King  Charles 
at  least  save  us  from  intemperate  condemnation  and 
illiberal  judgments.  The  King  was  not  consciously  the 
villain  of  the  piece.  Great  as  were  his  mistakes,  ludicrous 
as  were  his  pretensions,  and  inevitable  as  was  his  removal 
from  the  path  of  English  life,  he  was  not  of  set  purpose 
opposing  himself  either  to  the  Will  of  God  or  to  the  pro¬ 
sperity  of  his  subjects.  He  was  Life  with  its  head  over 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL  151 

its  shoulder.  He  was  evolution  in  a  mould  which  creation 
had  made  to  be  broken.  He  was  an  authority  which  had 
ceased  to  be  authentic.  He  implicitely  believed  that  he 
was  the  head  of  the  Church.  He  could  not  conceive  of 
anybody  else  telling  people  what  they  were  to  believe  and 
how  they  were  to  act.  As  for  the  will  of  his  subjects,  the 
nation  gave  him  proof  when  swords  were  drawn  that  he 
had  read  its  wish  aright.  Three-quarters  of  the  King¬ 
dom  were  on  his  side. 

It  is  a  curious  truth  that  the  English  nation  was  not 
restive  when  the  King  placed  his  finger  on  its  conscience. 
Revolution  came  because  he  could  not  keep  his  hands  out 
of  its  pockets.  Bossuet  charged  our  ancestors  under  the 
Tudors  and  the  Stuarts  with  the  humiliating  weakness  of 
submissiveness,  and  it  is  difficult  to  repel  the  accusation, 
which  is  so  contrary  to  our  national  legends.  Submis¬ 
siveness  under  the  Tudors  might  pass  for  loyalty.  Those 
passionate  sovereigns  prospered  the  nation  and  almost 
brought  a  Golden  Age  to  our  English  earth.  But  Charles 
the  First  reduced  the  country  not  only  to  a  condition  of 
impotence,  but  to  a  state  of  derision.  He  was  outwitted 
by  the  Spaniards,  beaten  by  the  French,  and  ridiculed  by 
the  Dutch.  And  the  country  was  still  submissive.  One 
asks  oneself  whether  submission  is  the  right  word.  Under 
the  Tudors  that  word  might  pass;  but  under  Charles 
Stuart  is  not  servility  the  juster  term? 

To  account  for  such  a  state  of  mind  in  our  ancestors 


SEVEN  AGES 


152 

one  looks  for  a  cause  more  powerful  than  the  right  hand 
of  an  incompetent  and  disastrous  King.  One  finds  the 
fault  in  themselves.  “The  fault  is  not  in  our  stars,  but 
in  ourselves,  that  we  are  underlings.”  Materialism,  the 
oldest  and  the  most  victorious  enemy  of  evolution,  had 
put  chains  of  servitude  on  the  English  people.  They 
cared  for  nothing  but  the  rewards  of  commerce.  So 
given  up  were  they  to  material  prosperity  that  they  were 
known  as  the  cheats  and  rogues  of  Europe.  A  document 
dated  1585  tells  of  the  shoddy  manufactured  in  England: 
“Many  good  laws  have  been  made  about  it,  but  there  is 
no  execution  of  them,  for  it  is  most  manifest,  and  I  am 
right  sorry  to  say  it,  but  it  is  true,  that  there  is  more  false 
cloth  and  woollen  made  in  this  realm  than  in  all  Europe 
besides.”  Laws  were  passed  attempting  to  check  the  two 
evils  of  false  weights  and  adulterations  which  were  cor¬ 
rupting  the  whole  national  life  and  contributing  to  the  ill 
fame  of  England  on  the  Continent.  Agriculture,  the 
very  bedrock  of  the  national  greatness,  was  also  in  evil 
case.  The  small-holder  had  been  dispossessed;  the  peas¬ 
ants  were  punished  for  demanding  a  fair  wage,  the  cot¬ 
tages  of  the  poor  were  no  better  than  hovels,  and  the  rich 
were  more  and  more  converting  arable  land  into  pasture 
— King  Charles  plundering  on  a  scale  which  staggers  us. 
There  had  been  little  piety  and  much  frank  greed  in  the 
breaking  up  of  the  monasteries.  The  Church  was  robbed 
by  the  rich,  the  poor  were  enslaved  by  the  rich,  and  the 
State  was  composed  of  the  plunderers — composed,  that 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


153 


is,  of  the  Sovereign,  the  new  nobility  which  had  arisen 
from  the  ashes  of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses,  the  merchants 
from  which  that  new  nobility  was  recruited,  and  the 
tradespeople  who  battened  on  this  rich  prosperity  of  a 
commercial  age. 

It  is  of  the  first  importance,  if  one  wishes  to  under¬ 
stand  the  work  of  the  Puritans,  to  realise  that  material¬ 
ism  was  the  ruling  spirit  of  England  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  and  that  this  spirit  of  materialism  had  reduced 
the  great  bulk  of  the  nation  to  a  condition  of  the  most 
humiliating  servility. 

“Let  me  speak  a  paradox  but  a  truth,”  said  Thomas 
Adams,  preaching  at  St.  Paul’s  in  the  year  1612;  “it  is 
the  plague  of  many  that  they  are  not  plagued :  even  this  is 
their  punishment,  the  want  of  punishment :  and  the  hand 
of  God  is  then  heaviest,  when  it  is  lightest :  heaviest  on 
the  conscience,  when  lightest  on  the  carcase.” 

For  seventeen  years  the  English  people  submitted  to 
the  absolutism  of  a  King  who  could  never  start  a  venture 
without  meeting  disaster  and  never  open  his  mouth  with¬ 
out  uttering  an  absurdity.  He  could  address  a  Parlia¬ 
ment  in  which  sat  men  like  Hampden,  Pym,  Selden,  Coke, 
and  Eliot,  with  words  of  this  nature :  “Remember  that 
Parliaments  are  altogether  in  my  power  for  their  calling, 
sitting,  and  dissolution;  therefore,  as  I  find  the  fruits  of 
them  good  or  evil,  they  are  to  continue  or  not  to  be.” 
When  he  was  refused  supplies  he  told  the  House  of  Com¬ 
mons  that  he  had  other  means  of  getting  money,  adding 


iS4 


SEVEN  AGES 


with  an  insolence  which  would  have  astonished  Elizabeth, 
“Take  not  this  as  a  threat,  for  I  scorn  to  threaten  any 
but  my  equals.”  When  Parliament  declared  its  right  to 
control  the  militia,  certainly  an  innovation,  he  made  an¬ 
swer,  “By  God,  not  for  an  hour!”  He  was  convinced 
that  he  was  essential  to  the  existence  of  the  realm.  “You 
cannot  be  without  me,”  was  one  of  his  phrases;  another, 
“You  will  fall  to  ruin  if  I  do  not  sustain  you”;  and  an¬ 
other,  uttered  with  almost  his  last  breath,  “A  subject  and 
a  sovereign  are  clean  different  things.” 

Nothing  so  sharply  reveals  to  us  the  grotesque  arro¬ 
gance  of  his  mind  as  the  royal  declaration  of  1629  order¬ 
ing  theology  to  put  up  its  shutters.  He  believed  that  he 
could  stop  evolution  by  an  edict,  thus  saving  Dame  Part¬ 
ington  from  becoming  the  most  ludicrous  figure  of  his¬ 
tory.  There  was  to  be  no  more  searching  for  divine  truth, 
no  more  speculation  in  the  dark  region  of  religion.  The 
King  had  spoken;  let  theology  stand  still,  and  his  subjects 
hold  their  peace. 

His  capacity  to  interpret  the  good  news  of  Christianity 
may  be  judged  by  the  ferocity  and  the  meanness  which 
characterised  his  punishments  of  those  who  could  not 
take  their  conscience  from  the  King.  For  publishing  a 
tract  against  prelacy  Leighton  was  sentenced  “to  pay  a 
fine  of  £10,000,  to  be  pilloried  at  Westminster,  and  then 
to  be  whipped  and  have  an  ear  cut  off,  and  at  some  future 
time  to  undergo  the  like  punishment  at  Cheapside,  after 
which  he  was  to  be  imprisoned  for  life.”  For  his  attack 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


155 


on  the  disgusting  lewdness  of  the  stage,  which  contained, 
we  must  admit,  a  gross  attack  on  the  Queen,  the  barrister 
William  Prynne  was  sentenced  “to  be  imprisoned  for 
life,  to  pay  a  fine  of  £5,000,  to  be  expelled  from  Lincoln’s 
Inn,  and  to  be  disbarred,  to  be  deprived  of  his  academic 
Degree,  to  be  set  in  the  pillory,  and  to  have  both  his  ears 
cut  off.”  Henry  Burton,  a  clergyman,  and  John  Bast- 
wick,  a  physician,  for  pamphlets  against  prelacy  and 
idolatrous  ceremonies,  were  fined  £5,000  each,  put  in 
the  pillory,  had  their  ears  cut  off,  and  were  sentenced 
to  imprisonment  for  life.  John  Lilburne,  twenty  years 
of  age,  for  publishing  Puritan  books  in  Holland  and  re¬ 
fusing  to  answer  the  interrogatories  of  the  Star  Cham¬ 
ber,  was  “flogged  and  pilloried,  and  then  placed  in  most 
rigorous  durance  in  the  Fleet  prison,  where  he  would 
have  died  of  hunger  had  not  his  fellow  prisoners  given 
him  of  their  scanty  food.” 

These  cases,  and  many  others,  are  mentioned  by  Mr. 
F.  C.  Montague  in  the  seventh  volume  of  The  Political 
History  of  England,  a  contribution  to  the  English  narra¬ 
tive  of  the  seventeenth  century  which  has  no  rival  in  our 
libraries  for  accuracy,  impartiality,  and  patient  psycho¬ 
logical  penetration.  Lord  Morley,  in  his  volume  on 
Oliver  Cromwell,  speaks  with  indignation  of  the  split 
noses  and  the  slashed  cheeks  of  all  those  who  had  the 
courage  to  resist  Charles’s  Spanish  absolutism.  He  has 
small  sympathy  for  the  narrowness  of  the  Puritans  and 
nothing  save  condemnation  for  their  intolerance;  but  for 


SEVEN  AGES 


156 

him  Charles  is  a  mean  creature  of  duplicity,  ungenial  and 
disobliging,  without  indwelling  moral  dignity,  the  royal 
egotist  without  the  mark.  “Of  gratitude  for  services,  of 
sympathy,  of  courage  in  friendship,  he  never  showed  a 
spark.”  He  cites  Charles’s  treatment  of  Sir  John  Eliot: 

“The  rigours  of  his  prison-house  in  the  Tower  could 
not  break  that  dauntless  spirit,  but  they  killed  him. 
The  King  knew  well  what  he  was  doing,  and  even  carried 
his  vindictiveness  beyond  death.  Eliot’s  young  son  peti¬ 
tioned  the  King  that  he  might  carry  the  remains  to  Corn¬ 
wall  to  lie  with  those  of  his  ancestors.  Charles  wrote  on 
the  petition  ‘Let  Sir  John  Eliot’s  body  be  buried  in  the 
parish  of  that  church  where  he  died’;  and  his  ashes  lay 
unmarked  in  the  chapel  of  the  Tower.” 


It  was  with  a  King  of  this  character  that  Puritan  Eng¬ 
land  bore  for  seventeen  years  of  cruelty,  of  foreign  ad¬ 
ventures  which  ended  in  disaster,  of  an  ever-increasing 
influence  of  the  Jesuits,  and  of  arbitrary  power.  A  mer¬ 
chant  of  London  declared  that  in  no  part  of  the  world 
were  merchants  “so  screwed  and  wrung  as  in  England; 
in  Turkey  they  have  more  encouragement.”  Yet  the 
Church  supported  him,  the  Judiciary  registered  his  deci¬ 
sions  with  servility,  and  Parliament  was  humility  itself 

# 

in  venturing  to  assert  at  least  the  theoretical  existence  of 
its  ancient  liberties.  A  controversy  arose  between  Rex 
and  Lex ,  out  of  which  was  to  emerge  the  England  of 
modern  history.  Finch,  a  former  speaker  of  the  House 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


157 


of  Commons,  declared  that  no  Act  of  Parliament  makes 
any  difference  to  the  King’s  prerogative.  The  King  could 
levy  what  taxes  he  chose,  could  raise  what  armies  he 
chose,  could  take  away  any  liberties,  however  ancient, 
which  in  his  eyes  hindered  good  government.  Berkeley 
said  bluntly  that  law  was  nothing  more  than  the  King’s 
servant.  When  the  Chief  Baron  hesitated  to  decide 
against  members  of  Parliament  imprisoned  by  Charles’s 
order,  Charles  suspended  him,  and  judges  were  found 
to  do  the  King’s  will.  For  eleven  years  he  ruled  England 
without  a  Parliament. 


“The  time  had  come,”  says  Mr.  Montague,  “when 
England  must  be  either  a  country  of  legal  freedom  or 
a  country  of  absolute  power.  The  Stuarts,  to  use 
Burke’s  phrase,  had  made  the  medicine  of  the  constitution 
its  daily  food.  Out  of  all  the  arbitrary  acts  of  high- 
minded  rulers,  often  in  times  of  real  stress  and  peril,  they 
had  made  a  practice  of  the  constitution,  and  then,  going 
beyond  the  Tudors,  they  had  based  this  practice  on  a 
clear  and  rigorous  theory  of  monarchical  power  which 
recognised  in  the  law  no  force  but  the  sovereign’s  pleasure 
and  gave  the  subject  no  title  to  his  liberty  but  the  sover¬ 
eign’s  forbearance.  Parliament  could  not  but  join  issue 
with  such  Kings.” 


Life,  brought  to  this  fateful  impasse,  struggled  for 
freedom  in  two  directions.  Galileo  died  in  the  first  vear 
of  England’s  Civil  War,  and  on  Christmas  Day  of  that 


158 


SEVEN  AGES 


same  year  Isaac  Newton  was  bom  in  a  Lincolnshire 
farmhouse.  A  power  greater  than  politics  was  at  work 
in  the  world;  into  that  world  a  mind  had  now  come  de¬ 
stined  to  exercise  an  unchallenged  supremacy  over  the 
human  intellect  for  nearly  three  hundred  years;  hence¬ 
forth  neither  the  priest  nor  the  statesman  was  to  lead  the 
advancing  armies  of  humanity,  but  the  mathematician. 
It  is  at  least  a  striking  coincidence  that  the  last  year  of 
the  sixteenth  century  witnessed  the  burning  at  the  stake 
of  Giordano  Bruno,  after  six  years’  imprisonment,  and 
that  while  Arminian  and  Puritan  were  opening  the  seven¬ 
teenth  century  with  blood  and  fire  Galileo  was  at  Rome  de¬ 
fending  the  Copernican  system  against  the  orthodox 
Ptolemaic  astronomy.  Galileo,  musician,  painter,  and 
poet,  was  in  truth  a  far  more  formidable  enemy  of  Rome 
than  Cromwell  or  Milton.  In  discovering  the  Laws  of 
Motion  and  laying  the  foundations  of  Mechanics,  and  in 
preparing  the  way  of  Isaac  Newton,  we  may  say  that  he 
was  doing  even  greater  service  for  mankind  than  the 
sword  of  the  one  or  the  pen  of  the  other.1 

But  Life,  seeking  its  freedom  along  the  path  of 
science,  had  at  that  same  moment  a  more  convulsive 
movement  to  make  on  the  older  road  of  politics.  It  may 
be  said  without  absurdity,  seeing  what  has  followed  from 

1  One  may  see  the  distance  covered  by  mankind  since  those  days 
when  one  remembers  that  the  blind  Galileo,  broken  by  the  death 
of  his  favourite  daughter,  was  denied  the  right,  as  the  prisoner  of 
the  Inquisition,  either  to  make  a  will  or  to  be  buried  in  consecrated 
ground. 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


159 


the  English  revolution,  that  it  was  seeking  to  restore,  to 
re-create,  and  to  re-inspire  the  manhood  of  the  British 
Islands.  Servility,  born  of  a  gross  materialism,  was  de¬ 
stroying  that  manhood  so  that  it  could  play  no  part  in  the 
world  save  as  pedlar  and  carrier.  To  make  it  a  moral 
force  on  this  planet,  to  give  it  a  Washington  for  America, 
a  Livingstone  for  Africa,  a  Lawrence  for  India,  and  a 
Newton,  a  John  Howard,  a  Darwin,  and  a  Lister  for  all 
mankind,  it  was  necessary  to  break  down  the  blank  wall 
of  monarchical  despotism,  to  overthrow  the  obstacle  of 
an  obscurantic  clericalism,  and  to  burn  up  with  fire  from 
heaven  the  base  materialism  in  which  the  soul  of  England 
was  perishing. 

Nature,  that  hateth  emptiness, 

Allows  of  penetration  less, 

And  therefore  must  make  room 
Where  greater  spirits  come. 

While  Newton  slept  in  his  cradle,  the  sword  of  Crom¬ 
well  did  all  these  things.  It  was  but  a  small  part  of  his 
achievement  to  sweep  away  the  armed  forces  of  royalism 
— they  returned  triumphant  after  his  death;  it  was  also 
a  small  part  of  his  achievement  to  overthrow  the  tyranny 
of  a  priesthood — that  tyranny  too  crept  back  into  Eng¬ 
land  after  his  death;  but  in  burning  up  the  materialism 
of  his  age,  he  burnt  up  for  evermore  the  humiliating  ser¬ 
vility  of  the  English  people,  set  English  manhood  on  its 
feet  for  all  time,  and  brought  into  existence  the  great  and 


i6o 


SEVEN  AGES 


world-inspiring  ideal  of  English  democracy.  Materialism 
returned,  and  will  ever  return,  but  since  Cromwell’s  day 
it  has  been  met  by  something  in  English  character  which 
at  least  suspects  it  and  which  can  no  longer  be  deluded 
by  the  snares  of  its  worst  slavery.  Monarchy  returned, 
but  not  as  an  absolute  monarchy;  clericalism  came  back, 
but  not  with  the  faggots  of  the  Inquisition.  Cromwell 
had  cleared  the  field  for  a  new  idea  of  freedom,  for  a 
new  moral  dignity  of  man,  and  had  roused  the  conscience 
of  England  to  a  new  conception  of  truth  which  brought 
with  it  a  new  ideal  of  honesty. 

Lord  Acton,  a  devout  Catholic,  saw  clearly  enough 
in  the  documents  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  cen¬ 
turies,  that  religious  tolerance  was  won  against  the  oppo¬ 
sition  of  religious  people,  both  Catholic  and  Protestant, 
and  his  honest  mind  attributed  to  the  heroism  and  self- 
sacrifice  which  won  the  English  people  their  civil  liberties 
that  inestimable  benefit  of  tolerance  which  not  only  allows 
men  to  worship  God  in  the  fashion  they  deem  best,  but 
permits  science  to  ask  whatever  questions  it  chooses  of 
the  universe,  without  fear  of  the  dungeon,  the  rack,  and 
the  stake : 

“If  in  the  seventeenth  century,  which  achieved  so  much 
for  civil  liberty,  freedom  of  conscience  was  not  estab¬ 
lished  in  England,  the  fault  lay  with  the  oppressed  com¬ 
munities  as  much  as  with  the  crown  or  the  dominant 
church.  The  Catholic  and  the  Protestant  sects  were  alike 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


161 


intolerant.  The  latter  deserved  what  they  received,  and 
justified  by  their  theories  and  their  acts  the  penal  laws 
by  which  they  suffered.  They  were  ready  to  do  to  others 
what  was  done  to  them.  No  religious  party  in  the  coun¬ 
try  admitted  the  right  of  minorities  to  the  protection  of 
the  law.  Religious  liberty  grew  up  in  England  as  the 
fruit  of  civil  liberty,  of  which  it  is  a  part,  and  in  conjunc¬ 
tion  with  which  it  has  yet  much  way  to  make.  But  if  the 
Protestants  were  not  sincere  in  arguing  for  toleration, 
the  Catholics  were  not  honest  in  the  means  by  which  they 
endeavoured  to  obtain  it.  They  sought  as  a  concession 
that  which  was  a  right ;  they  wished  for  privilege  instead 
of  liberty;  and  they  defended  an  exception  and  not  a 
principle.  The  Catholics  of  that  age  had  degenerated 
from  the  old  mediaeval  spirit,  which  stood  by  the  right 
and  respected  the  law,  but  did  not  stoop  to  power.  In 
the  great  constitutional  struggle  they  disregarded  the  im¬ 
pending  absolutism  and  the  outraged  laws,  and  gave  to 
the  royal  cause,  when  it  was  most  in  fault,  a  support 
which,  by  prolonging  the  contest,  drove  the  parliamentary 
opposition  into  lawless  extremes,  and  postponed  for  half 
a  century  the  establishment  of  freedom.” — Historical 
Essays  and  Studies,  p.  12 1. 

This  just  statement  of  the  case,  so  valuable  from  its 
source,  should  help  to  correct  one  of  the  most  common 
errors  concerning  Cromwell's  place  in  English  history.  In 
Milton  and  Bunyan,  says  Lord  Morley,  rather  than  in 
Cromwell,  we  seek  what  was  deepest,  loftiest,  and  most 
abiding  in  Puritanism :  “we  look  to  its  apostles  rather  than 
its  soldier.”  But  Cromwell  was  something  much  greater 


SEVEN  AGES 


162 

than  the  soldier  of  puritanism.  He  was  the  soldier  of 
liberty.  His  terrible  sword  was  not  drawn  to  set  up  a 
sectarian  democracy,  but  to  win  for  the  English  people 
their  civil  liberties.  Deep  as  was  his  own  sense  of  God’s 
personal  dealing  with  the  individual  soul,  sharp  as  were 
the  marks  of  Calvin  on  his  heavy  but  not  morbid  heart, 
Cromwell  was  the  greatest  enemy  of  religious  intoler¬ 
ance  in  the  seventeenth  century  only  because  he  was  the 
most  powerful  warrior  of  human  freedom. 

Democracy  was  born  in  the  camp  of  Cromwell’s  army. 
At  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil  War  the  soldiers  of  the  Par¬ 
liament  were  no  better  disciplined  or  inspired  than  the 
soldiers  of  the  King.  They  mutinied,  they  robbed,  they 
drank  themselves  into  a  sottish  condition  whenever  they 
got  free  access  to  alcohol,  and  they  deserted.  One  of  their 
own  generals  declared  them  to  be  fit  only  for  a  gallows 
here  and  a  hell  hereafter.  Cromwell’s  religious  zeal,  his 
masterful  sense  of  order,  his  inspiring  leadership  of  men, 
and  his  iron  discipline  raised  up  in  the  New  Model  “such 
an  army,”  says  Mr.  Montague,  “as  has  never  been  sur¬ 
passed,  perhaps  never  been  equalled,  in  England.”  This 
army  stood  between  the  fanatical  intolerance  of  both  the 
Arminians  and  the  Presbyterians.  It  stood  for  freedom. 
It  would  subscribe  to  no  exclusiveness.  It  had  one  purpose 
and  one  inspiration,  to  win  for  itself  and  for  the  whole 
nation  that  liberty  of  conscience  which  it  could  obtain 
neither  from  the  King  nor  the  Parliament.  “Many  of 
the  doctrines  which  in  the  following  century  shook 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL  163 

Europe  and  America  were  first  proclaimed  by  the  war¬ 
riors  of  the  New  Model.” 

To  Cromwell  more  than  to  any  man  in  history  the 
world  owes  the  idea  of  political  liberty.  Others  there 
were,  before  his  day  and  in  his  own  hour,  whose  loftier 
souls  cherished  this  ideal  of  a  free  and  merciful  state; 
Lilburne  the  Leveller  was  perhaps  the  true  apostle,  in 
Cromwell’s  time,  of  democracy;  but  Cromwell,  with  all 
his  faults  and  in  spite  of  all  his  failures,  was  the  first  man 
in  the  world  to  take  the  seed  of  this  idea  out  of  the  human 
mind  and  plant  it  in  the  actual  earth  of  daily  life.  He 
was  truly  a  man  sent  by  God,  and  none  the  less  an  authen¬ 
tic  messenger  of  that  Providence  whose  patience  fills  us 
with  an  inarticulate  wonderment  because,  like  almost 
every  other  inspired  man,  he  did  not  see  to  the  end  of 
God’s  purpose.  Andrew  Marvell  was  right : 

’Tis  madness  to  resist  or  blame 
The  face  of  angry  heaven’s  flame; 

And  if  we  would  speak  true, 

Much  to  the  Man  is  due 

Who,  from  his  private  gardens,  where 
He  lived  reserved  and  austere 
(As  if  his  highest  plot 
To  plant  the  bergamot) 

Could  by  industrious  valour  climb  \ 

To  ruin  the  great  work  of  time 
And  cast  the  Kingdoms  old 
Into  another  mould. 


164 


SEVEN  AGES 


But  the  achievement  of  Cromwell  is  now  so  manifest  to 
all  who  have  studied  the  documents  of  his  time  that  one 
need  not  insist  upon  the  debt  which  men  owe  to  his  con¬ 
summate  generalship,  his  noble  idealism,  and  his  inspiring 
effort  to  grapple  with  an  inspiration.  It  is  in  his  failure 
to  set  up  the  machinery  of  democracy  on  the  ancient 
ground  of  monarchy  that  we  may  best  find  our  way  to 
follow  the  path  of  moral  and  intellectual  evolution. 

“Thou  canst  not  be  free,”  Milton  declared  to  him,  “if 
we  are  not;  for  it  is  the  law  of  nature  that  he  who  takes 
away  the  liberty  of  others  is  by  that  act  the  first  himself 
to  lose  his  own.  A  mighty  task  hast  thou  undertaken; 
it  will  probe  thee  to  the  core,  it  will  show  thee  as  thou  art, 
thy  carriage,  thy  force,  thy  weight ;  whether  there  be  truly 
alive  in  thee  that  piety,  fidelity,  justice,  and  moderation 
of  spirit,  for  which  we  believe  that  God  hath  exalted  thee 
above  thy  fellows.  To  guide  three  mighty  states  by  coun¬ 
sel,  to  conduct  them  from  institutions  of  error  to  a 
worthier  discipline,  to  extend  a  provident  care  to  fur¬ 
thest  shores,  to  watch,  to  foresee,  to  shrink  from  no  toil, 
to  flee  all  the  empty  shows  of  opulence  and  power — these 
indeed  are  things  so  arduous  that,  compared  with  them, 
war  is  but  as  the  play  of  children.” 

Cromwell  strove  to  serve  humanity  in  this  sublime 
fashion.  It  is  agreed  by  all  competent  men  that  he  tried; 
no  one  asserts  that  ambition  urged  him  towards  autocracy. 
He  bade  Parliament  be  “pitiful  and  tender  to  all,  though 
of  different  judgments.  Love  all,”  he  went  on,  “tender 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL  165 

all,  cherish  and  countenance  all,  in  all  things  that  are 
good.  And  if  the  poorest  Christian,  the  most  mistaken 
Christian,  shall  desire  to  live  peaceably  and  quietly  under 
you — I  say,  if  any  shall  desire  but  to  lead  a  life  of  godli¬ 
ness  and  honesty,  let  him  be  protected/’  There  spoke  the 
very  heart  of  this  tempestuous  man  whose  anger  flamed 
up  only  in  the  face  of  intolerance.  Cromwell,  “our  chief 
of  men,”  was  cruel  only  when  he  encountered  cruelty, 
and  Milton  spoke  truly,  reminding  him  that  “Peace  hath 
her  victories  no  less  renowned  than  War,”  when  he  said 
of  the  Protector  that  his  life  had  been  “guided  by  faith 
and  matchless  fortitude.” 

To  the  Parliament  of  1656  the  Protector  addressed 
these  words :  “There  is  one  general  grievance  in  the 
nation.  It  is  the  law.  I  think,  I  may  say  it,  I  have  as 
eminent  judges  in  this  land  as  have  been  had,  or  that  the 
nation  has  had  for  these  many  years.  .  .  .  But  the  truth 
of  it  is,  there  are  wicked  and  abominable  laws  that  will 
be  in  your  power  to  alter.  To  hang  a  man  for  sixpence, 
threepence,  I  know  not  what,  to  hang  for  a  trifle,  and 
pardon  murder,  is  in  the  ministration  of  the  law  through 
the  old  framing  of  it.  I  have  known  in  my  experience 
abominable  murders  quitted;  and  to  see  men  lose  their 
lives  for  petty  matters!  This  is  a  thing  that  God  will 
reckon  for;  and  I  wish  it  may  not  lie  upon  this  nation  a 
day  longer  than  you  have  an  opportunity  to  give  a 
remedy;  and  I  hope  I  shall  cheerfully  join  with  you  in  it.” 

Those  who  point  an  accusing  finger  to  his  work  in 


SEVEN  AGES 


1 66 

Ireland  forget  that  among  the  execrable  and  blood-thirsty 
murders  of  men,  women,  and  children  in  Piedmont  who 
roused  the  wrath  of  Milton,  there  were  many  Irish  mer¬ 
cenaries,  forget,  that  is  to  say,  that  “the  wild  Irish”  of 
those  times  had  not  reached  the  moral  stature  even  of  the 
Irish  of  the  twentieth  century.1 

Cromwell  himself  has  explained  his  severity.  In  his 
Declaration  to  the  Irish  bishops  he  announced  that  Ire¬ 
land  had  once  been  united  to  England,  and  went  on  to 
say:  “You  broke  this  Union.  You,  unprovoked,  put  the 
English  to  the  most  unheard  of  and  most  barbarous 
massacre  (without  respect  of  sex  or  age)  that  ever  the 
sun  beheld.”  Catholic  writers  have  probably  exaggerated 
his  vengeance,  for,  severe  as  it  may  have  been,  Cromwell, 
who  was  as  truthful  as  he  was  fearless,  challenged  the 
Irish  to  prove  their  accusations  in  these  remarkable 
words,  “Give  us  an  instance  of  one  man  since  my  coming 
into  Ireland,  not  in  arms,  massacred,  destroyed,  or  ban¬ 
ished;  concerning  the  massacre  or  the  destruction  of 
whom  justice  hath  not  been  done,  or  endeavoured  to  be 
done.” 

Lord  Morley  reminds  the  modern  reader  why  the  Eng¬ 
lish  of  that  day  regarded  the  Church  of  Rome  as  the 
enemy  of  human  society: 

1  During  the  expedition  against  Cadiz  in  1702,  “soldiers  and 
sailors  plundered  Port  St.  Mary,  even  robbing  the  churches,  a 
pastime  in  which  Lord  Nugent’s  Irish  ‘Rapparees,’  as  they  were 
called,  specially  distinguished  themselves”  ( Political  History  of 
England,  vol.  ix,  p.  13). 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


167 


.  .  the  counter-reformation  or  the  catholic  reaction, 
by  the  time  when  Cromwell  and  Charles  came  into  the 
world,  had  achieved  startling  triumphs.  The  indomitable 
activity  of  the  Jesuits  had  converted  opinion,  and  the 
arm  of  flesh  lent  its  aid  in  the  holy  task  of  reconquering 
Christendom.  What  the  arm  of  flesh  meant  the  English 
could  see  with  the  visual  eye.  They  never  forgot  Mary 
Tudor  and  the  Protestant  martyrs.  In  1567  Alva  set  up 
his  court  of  blood  in  the  Netherlands.  In  1572  the  pious 
work  in  France  began  with  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholo¬ 
mew.  In  1588  the  Armada  appeared  in  the  British 
Channel  for  the  subjugation  and  conversion  of  England. 
In  1605  Guy  Fawkes  and  his  powder-barrels  were  found 
in  the  vault  under  the  House  of  Lords.  These  were  the 
things  that  explain  that  endless  angry  refrain  against 
popery,  that  rings  through  our  seventeenth  century  with 
a  dolorous  monotony  at  which  modern  indifference  may 
smile  and  reason  and  tolerance  may  groan.” 


Whether  it  be  the  Romish  influence  or  some  other 
cause,  it  would  seem  from  later  history  that  in  the  Irish 
nature  there  is  an  element  of  discord  which  baffles  itself, 
and  a  force  with  which  evolution  finds  it  difficult  to  co¬ 
operate. 

But  if  Cromwell  strove  with  all  his  might  to  set  up 
a  tolerant  and  benevolent  democracy,  nevertheless  he 
failed ;  and  his  failure,  as  I  have  said,  is  our  shortest  way 
to  an  understanding  both  of  his  character  and  of  the 
England  of  his  day. 

Cromwell  failed  because  the  manhood  of  the  British 


SEVEN  AGES 


1 68 

Isles  was  not  yet  fitted  for  self-government.  It  was  still, 
in  an  overwhelming  majority,  on  the  side  of  materialism. 
The  men  who  followed  him  were  scarce  a  handful  of  the 
people ;  and  many  among  those  who  called  themselves  In¬ 
dependents  were  of  that  colour  in  theology  only  because 
they  wanted  peace  for  their  trading.  Like  so  many  en¬ 
thusiasts,  Cromwell  forgot  the  pull  on  spirit  of  this  imme¬ 
morial  obstinacy  of  matter.  He  thought  that  the  majority 
of  the  nation  would  welcome  a  condition  of  things  which 
made  for  moral  dignity,  for  freedom  of  conscience,  and 
for  the  Kingdom  of  God.  He  was  wrong.  Further,  he 
thought  that  among  all  those  who  desired  these  things 
there  would  be  unanimity  of  mind.  And  here  again  he 
was  wrong.  “I  am  more  troubled  now,”  he  exclaimed 
in  his  perplexity,  “with  the  fool  than  with  the  knave.” 

Macaulay  very  often  speaks  of  the  English  as  though 
they  had  always  been  champions  of  freedom  and  warriors 
of  the  law.  But  even  he  is  obliged  to  confess  the  servility 
of  the  nation  under  the  Tudors  and  the  Stuarts.  Eng¬ 
land,  he  says,  has  no  such  names  to  show  in  the  history 
of  the  Reformation  as  Luther,  Calvin,  and  Knox.  That 
Reformation,  so  far  as  England  is  concerned,  was  merely 
a  political  scheme  “to  transfer  the  full  cup  of  sorceries 
from  the  Babylonian  enchantress  to  other  hands,  spilling 
as  little  as  possible  by  the  way.”  Henry  the  Eighth  took 
the  place  of  the  Roman  Pontiff.  The  same  mysteries 
existed  :  it  was  only  the  dispenser  who  was  changed.  “He 
punished  with  equal  severity  those  who  renounced  the 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


169 


doctrines  of  Rome,  and  those  who  acknowledged  her 
jurisdiction.”  Elizabeth  detested  the  Puritans.  James 
detested  them  even  more  than  Elizabeth.  No  atheist 
could  have  been  so  hated  by  Tudor  and  Stuart  as  those 
simple  realists  of  the  Christian  religion.  Power  was  in 
the  hands  of  sovereigns  who  believed  more  passionately 
in  uniformity  than  in  the  existence  of  God.  The  enslave¬ 
ment  of  the  human  mind  was  the  first  article  of  their 
faith.  The  Church  was  a  buttress  to  the  Throne.  And 
the  Throne  stood  for  Authority — that  unifying  principle 
without  which  humanity  would  fall  asunder.  As  for  re¬ 
ligion,  it  was  conformity  to  a  ritual.  A  gallant  cavalier 
hanged  for  a  burglary  after  the  Restoration  “told  the 
crowd  that  his  mind  received  great  consolation  from 
one  reflection :  he  had  always  taken  off  his  hat  when  he 
went  into  a  church.” 

Many  of  the  finest  spirits  in  England  left  the 
shores  of  the  British  Islands  rather  than  live  under 
the  tyranny  of  such  popish  sovereigns.  America  was 
enriched  by  this  defection,  England  impoverished.  The 
conquerors  of  Charles  the  First  were  a  minority  of  the 
nation;  those  who  strewed  roses  in  the  way  of  Charles 
the  Second  the  vast  majority  of  the  British  people.  It 
is  only  when  we  thoroughly  apprehend  the  condition  of 
the  English  mind  in  the  seventeenth  century  that  we  can 
appreciate  the  greatness  of  Cromwell’s  achievement  and 
understand  the  reason  of  his  failure.  He  established  reli- 


170 


SEVEN  AGES 


gious  freedom  in  a  divided  nation,  both  sides  of  which 
stood  for  religious  tyranny.  He  failed  to  set  up  a  free 
democracy  because  the  nation  was  too  sunk  in  materialism 
to  care  deeply  for  its  political  liberties.  All  that  sur¬ 
vived  of  his  heroic  achievement,  destined  in  after  years 
to  bear  such  amazing  fruit,  was  the  work  of  a  minority. 

Out  of  the  welter  of  those  dreadful  times  one  clear 
idea  emerged  into  the  full  daylight  of  English  life,  the 
noble  and  the  mighty  idea  that  the  Law  is  above  the 
King.  It  may  be  said  that  from  Cromwell’s  day  this 
central  belief  grew  in  the  English  mind  until  it  became 
the  religion  of  the  British  people.  And,  in  truth,  it  is 
a  religious  idea.  For  the  Law  is  of  all  witnesses  to  the 
truth  of  evolution  and  the  moral  idealism  of  the  human 
race  the  most  living  and  the  most  potent.  It  stands  for  a 
proof  of  man’s  faith  in  betterment  and  progress.  It  is  the 
hand  of  conscience  writing  on  the  parchment  of  physical 
evolution.  It  is  the  confession  of  man  that  there  is  in  this 
material  world  something  higher  than  selfishness,  some¬ 
thing  greater  than  a  struggle  for  existence,  something 
more  authoritative  than  the  caprices  of  individualism. 

Out  of  this  recognition  of  the  supremacy  of  Law  have 
come  all  our  liberties,  civil  and  religious.  We  are  not 
merely  free  to  think,  but  obliged  by  our  faith  in  truth 
to  think  carefully  and  honestly.  We  are  not  merely  free 
to  vote  who  shall  rule  over  us,  but  obliged  by  our  faith 
in  democracy  to  vote  as  men  and  women  into  whose  hands 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


171 

are  committed  the  awful  responsibility  of  the  higher  life 
of  the  human  race  and  the  material  fortunes  of  civilisa¬ 
tion.  With  us  it  is  not  as  it  is  with  the  people  of  Asia : 
the  Law  is  not  imposed  upon  us  either  by  a  deity  or  a 
potentate :  it  is  not  something  without  us,  but  within  us : 
it  is  not  something  we  disobey  at  our  peril,  but  something 
that  we  must  uphold  at  all  times  and  in  all  places,  some¬ 
thing  to  the  rescue  of  which  we  must  go  whenever  it  is 
in  danger,  ready  to  lay  down  our  lives  for  its  safety.  It 
is  we  ourselves,  at  our  highest  and  best. 

This  fundamental  greatness  of  modern  England  was 
the  work  of  Cromwell.  Forced  by  the  religious  intoler¬ 
ance  of  his  day  to  assume  the  position  of  arbitrary  ruler, 
forced  to  keep  order  in  a  divided  house  by  the  power  of 
his  unconquerable  army,  nevertheless  he  so  lifted  the  idea 
of  Law  out  of  the  mire  of  servility  that  when  Charles 
the  Second  returned  it  was  on  terms  which  guarded  the 
civil  liberties  of  the  realm  from  any  arbitrary  act  of  the 
royal  power.  Because  of  that  new  manhood  in  the  Eng¬ 
lish  people,  that  new  sense  of  something  above  them 
which  was  worth  living  for  and  dying  for,  something  in 
human  life  making  for  moral  dignity  and  intellectual 
power,  because  of  this,  not  only  was  religious  controversy 
brought  to  its  senses,  but  science  was  at  last  set  free  to  do 
its  mighty  work  on  the  human  soul. 

“The  whole  history  of  Christianity,”  says  Macaulay, 
“shows  that  she  is  in  far  greater  danger  of  being  cor- 


172 


SEVEN  AGES 


rupted  by  the  alliance  of  power  than  of  being  crushed  by 
its  opposition.  Those  who  thrust  temporal  sovereignty 
upon  her  treat  her  as  their  prototypes  treated  her  author. 
They  bow  the  knee,  and  spit  upon  her;  they  cry  ‘Hail’ 
and  smite  her  on  the  cheek ;  they  put  a  sceptre  in  her  hand, 
but  it  is  a  fragile  reed;  they  crown  her,  but  it  is  with 
thorns;  they  cover  with  purple  the  wounds  which  their 
own  hands  have  inflicted  on  her;  and  inscribe  magnifi¬ 
cent  titles  over  the  cross  on  which  they  have  fixed  her  to 
perish  in  ignominy  and  pain.” 

Christianity  revived  with  the  rise  of  science,  and  hence¬ 
forth  the  duel  between  materialism  and  idealism  was 
fought  out  in  an  atmosphere  of  liberty.  The  human  mind 
was  set  free  to  think  its  way  to  truth,  and  to  explore  every 
avenue  which  promised  a  way  to  reality.  Not  only  WUs 
the  earth  to  be  searched,  and  nature’s  laws  to  be  fearlessly 
examined,  but  as  fearlessly  the  documents  of  religion 
were  to  me  searched  and  examined  for  the  truth  hidden 
there  in  the  midst  of  legend,  superstition,  and  ignorance. 
The  whole  round  of  life  was  made  free  to  inquiry.  Hu¬ 
manity  advanced  in  knowledge,  in  power,  and  in  wealth, 
inclining  now  to  materialism  and  now  to  idealism,  but 
always  cherishing  in  its  mind  the  idea  of  a  road  to  be 
traversed  and  a  goal  to  be  reached.  Stagnation  died  with 
despotism. 

n 

“It  is  the  high  distinction  of  Oliver’s  Court,”  says 
Frederic  Harrison,  “that  for  once  it  exacted  morality 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


173 


and  purity  from  men  as  much  as  from  women.  He  long 
refused  his  daughter’s  hand  to  the  heir  of  the  Earl  of 
Warwick,  because  he  was  told  the  young  man  was  given 
to  play  and  other  vices.  The  state  kept  by  the  Protector, 
though  modest  and  serious,  was  neither  gloomy  nor  un¬ 
couth.  Oliver  loved  music,  encouraged  music,  and  held 
weekly  concerts.  He  loved  society;  and  was  frank,  hu¬ 
morous,  and  genial  with  his  intimates ;  affable  with 
dependants  and  strangers ;  stately  and  impressive  on  occa¬ 
sions  of  state.  It  is  remembered  to  his  honour  that  he 
preserved  to  our  country  the  cartoons  of  Raffaelle,  and 
the  ‘Triumph’  of  Mantegna,  together  with  some  royal 
palaces  and  parks;  that  he  collected  a  fine  library;  that 
he  sought  out  and  gathered  round  him  many  men  of 
genius  and  learning.1  He  was  generous  of  his  personal 
fortune,  and  made  no  use  of  power  to  extend  it.  He 
showed  no  disposition  to  nepotism ;  was  exceedingly  slow 
to  advance  his  own  sons;  did  nothing  to  promote  the 
private  interest  of  his  own  family.  About  his  whole 
career  there  was  no  stain  of  personal  interest.” 

Cromwell  explains  the  secret  of  his  greatness  in  the 
noble  address  he  made  to  the  Parliament  of  1656: 

“The  mind  is  the  man.  If  that  be  kept  pure,  a  man 
signifies  somewhat;  if  not,  I  would  very  fain  see  what 

1  Likewise  he  protected  Oxford  and  Cambridge  against  the  in¬ 
tolerant  zeal  and  aesthetic  ignorance  of  many  hotheads  in  the  England 
of  those  stormy  days. 


174 


SEVEN  AGES 


difference  there  is  betwixt  him  and  a  beast.  He  hath  only 
some  activity  to  do  some  more  mischief.” 

At  which  Carlyle  breaks  out  into  justifiable  thanks¬ 
giving:  “A  real  ‘Head  of  the  Church/  this  ‘King’;  not 
an  imaginary  one!”  And  when  Cromwell  speaks  of  the 
Eighty-first  Psalm,  quoting  many  of  those  majestic  verses 
to  the  House  of  Commons,  Carlyle  breaks  out  again: 
“What  a  vision  of  celestial  hope  is  this!  vista  into  Lands 
of  Light;  God’s  Will  done  on  earth;  this  poor  Earth;  this 
poor  English  Earth  an  Emblem  of  Heaven;  wheje  God’s 
Blessing  reigns  supreme;  where  ghostly  Falsity  and 
brutal  Greed  and  Baseness,  and  Cruelty  and  Cowardice 
and  Sin  and  Fear,  and  all  the  Hell-Dogs  of  Gehenna  shall 
lie  chained  under  our  feet;  and  Man,  august  in  divine 
manhood,  shall  step  victorious  over  them,  heavenward, 
like  a  god!  O  Oliver,  I  could  weep, —  and  yet  it  steads 
not.  Do  not  I  too  look  into  ‘Psalms,’  into  a  kind  of 
Eternal  Psalm,  unalterable  as  adamant, — which  the  whole 
world  yet  will  look  into?  Courage,  my  brave  one!” 

On  the  30th  January,  1661,  three  sledges  left  London 
for  Tyburn  each  bearing  a  coffin  which  contained  the 
body  of  a  man  long  dead. 

“When  these  three  carcases  were  at  Tyburn,”  says 
a  contemporary  account  of  the  proceedings,  “they  were 
pulled  out  of  their  coffins,  and  hanged  at  the  several 
angles  of  that  triple  tree,  where  they  hung  till  the  sun 


THE  AGE  OF  CROMWELL 


175 


was  set,  after  which  they  were  taken  down,  their  heads 
cut  off,  and  their  loathsome  trunks  thrown  into  a  deep 
hole  under  the  gallows.  The  heads  of  those  three  notorious 
regicides,  Oliver  Cromwell,  John  Bradshaw,  and  Henry 
Ireton,  are  set  upon  poles  on  the  top  of  Westminster  Hall 
by  the  common  hangman.” 

Thus  might  Charles  the  Second  wreak  pitiful  ven¬ 
geance  on  the  conqueror  of  his  father  and  the  greatest 
figure  in  the  narrative  of  English  liberty;  but  in  the 
same  year  Isaac  Newton  entered  Trinity  College,  Cam¬ 
bridge,  and  the  whole  history  of  the  English  thought 
turned  into  a  channel  where  neither  King  nor  Pope  could 
any  longer  play  the  part  of  Canute. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 
(i 703-1 79 i) 


✓ 


177 


♦ 


CHAPTER  VII 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 
( i 703-1 791) 

Under  Cromwell,  says  a  writer  in  an  old  Scotch  diction¬ 
ary  of  biography,  England  was  “unquestionably  the 
strongest  state  in  Europe ;  yet,  no  sooner  had  he  departed 
than  it  fell,  as  if  by  magic,  into  the  utmost  extreme  of 
impotency.  Its  next  monarch  was  a  pensioner  on  the 
bounty  of  the  magnificent  Frenchman.” 

Concerning  Cromwell  he  proceeds  as  follows : 

“In  the  field  he  was  everywhere  triumphant,  yet  no 
sooner  was  he  gone,  than  the  military  operations  of  Eng¬ 
land  became  puerile  and  ludicrous.  Oliver’s  flag,  the  red 
cross  of  Saint  George,  swept  from  the  ocean  every  hostile 
banner.  France,  Holland,  and  Spain,  were  humbled  into 
maritime  submission,  and  the  Barbary  corsairs  were 
scourged  into  good  behaviour — piracy  was  annihilated, 
and  the  naval  supremacy  of  England  was  established  as 
an  unquestioned  and  indisputable  fact.  Yet  Oliver  gone 
— and  the  Dutch  with  impunity  sail  up  the  Thames  and 
the  Medway.  He  had  the  most  moral  court  that  had 
ever  been  known  in  the  history  of  Europe,  yet  a  few  short 


179 


i8o 


SEVEN  AGES 


years  saw  vice  unblushingly  enthroned,  and  the  silken 
shoe  of  the  courtezan  treading  the  halls  that  had  echoed 
to  the  jackboots  of  Oliver  Cromwell  and  his  pious  Iron¬ 
sides.  In  Oliver’s  time  the  judge  sat  in  the  magnificence 
of  rectitude;  and  for  the  first  time  in  the  history  of 
modern  nations  justice  was  administered  in  the  fear  of 
God.  Yet  Oliver  gone,  and  Judge  Jeffreys  springs  from 
the  pandemonium  of  the  corrupted  English  law.  Every¬ 
thing  seemed  to  decay  and  ferment  into  corruption.  As 
if  the  force  of  gravity  had  been  removed  from  the  terres¬ 
trial  economy,  no  sooner  was  the  iron  will  of  Oliver  re¬ 
moved  from  the  state  of  England,  than  chaos,  confusion, 
and  failure  seemed  to  invade  every  department  of  the 
realm,  and  every  operation  of  the  body  politic.  Defeat, 
disgrace,  and  shame,  took  the  places  of  victory,  honour, 
and  estimation,  until  the  fury  of  England  was  once  more 
roused,  and  the  last  Stuart,  in  ignominious  flight,  took 
refuge  with  the  neighbour  nation,  whom  Oliver  would 
have  bearded  with  the  sword.  The  contrast  between 
England  in  the  time  of  the  Protector,  and  England  in  the 
days  of  Charles  and  James,  is  one  of  the  most  remarkable 
that  has  been  recorded  on  the  page  of  history.  Tragedy 
or  comedy,  it  is  the  strangest  drama  that  has  been  played 
in  England  since  the  Saxon  dynasty  died  out  at  Hastings, 
and  England  became  the  heritage  of  the  feudal  and  punc¬ 
tilious  Norman.” 


The  Restoration,  according  to  Mark  Pattison,  was 
a  moral  catastrophe.  “It  was  not  that  there  wanted  good 
men  among  the  Churchmen,  men  as  pious  and  virtuous 
as  the  Puritans  whom  they  displaced.  But  the  Royalists 


JOHN  WESLEY 

Done  from  a  miniature  of  the  same  size 
Painted  by  I.  Barry 


' 


- 


. 


' 

* 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


181 


came  back  as  the  party  of  reaction,  reaction  of  the  spirit 
of  the  world  against  asceticism,  of  self-indulgence  against 
duty,  of  materialism  against  idealism.” 

“For  a  time  virtue  was  a  public  laughing-stock,  and 
the  word  ‘saint/  the  highest  expression  in  the  language 
for  moral  perfection,  connoted  everything  that  was  ridic¬ 
ulous.  .  .  .  The  style  of  court  manners  was  a  mere  inci¬ 
dent  on  the  surface  of  social  life.  The  national  life  was 
more  profoundly  tainted  by  the  discouragement  of  all 
good  men,  which  penetrated  every  shire  and  every  parish, 
than  by  the  distant  reports  of  the  loose  behaviour  of 
Charles  II.  Servility,  meanness,  venality,  time-serving, 
and  a  disbelief  in  virtue  diffused  themselves  over  the 
nation  like  a  pestilential  miasma.  .  . 

The  heroic  age  of  England,  he  says,  had  passed  away, 
“not  by  gradual  decay,  by  imperceptible  degeneration,  but 
in  a  year,  in  a  single  day,  like  the  winter’s  snow  in 
Greece.”  A  disbelief  in  virtue  is  perhaps  the  most  deadly 
disease  that  can  pray  upon  a  nation.  In  the  case  of  Eng¬ 
land  it  must  have  proved  fatal  but  for  a  faithful  remnant 
of  the  true  Puritans. 

Roman  decadence,  says  Gilbert  Murray,  tends  to  exag¬ 
geration,  vainglory,  excess  of  ornament;  Greek  decadence 
is  humble  and  weary.  English  decadence,  we  may  say, 
because  of  the  root  of  Socratic  Puritanism  which  still 
feeds  the  national  character,  is  bitter,  scornful,  and  indig¬ 
nant.  It  is  as  if  the  nation  had  been  disappointed,  duped, 
fooled  in  the  sight  of  men  and  angels.  It  cries  out  to  God 


SEVEN  AGES 


182 


For  all  the  sins  wherewith  the  face  of  man 
Is  blackened,  man’s  forgiveness  give,  and  take, 

and  goes  on  its  sensual  way  with  an  air  either  of  coarse 
brutality  or  roystering  content  which  does  not,  however, 
hide  the  hurt  in  its  heart.  Fox  used  to  say  that  the  worst 
kind  of  Revolution  is  a  Restoration. 

Few  incidents  in  the  reign  of  Charles  the  Second  are 
more  haunting  and  more  illuminating  than  the  incident 
unearthed  only  in  recent  years  which  tells  us  how  this 
smiling  debauchee  had  a  son  by  a  lady  in  Jersey,  his  eldest 
son,  who  became  first  a  scholar  in  Holland,  then  a  monk, 
and  who  came  often  to  England  in  secret,  at  Charles’ 
poignant  request,  to  talk  to  his  father  about  the  Catholic 
faith.  It  was  with  tears  in  his  eyes  that  Charles  once 
told  the  Catholic  gentlemen  of  his  Court  how  earnestly 
he  longed  to  be  able  to  confess  his  Romanism.  The  only 
reality  in  that  shallow  and  unhappy  heart  was  the  ghost 
of  religion. 

To  understand  the  reaction  in  England  it  is  above  all 
things  important  that  we  should  see  one  of  its  causes 
in  the  degeneracy  of  the  later  Puritans.  Macaulay,  who 
abominated  the  vices  and  the  effeminacy  of  the  Royalists, 
who  applauded  the  famous  attack  of  Jeremy  Collier  on 
the  sensual  and  blasphemous  condition  of  the  stage,  and 
who  calls  the  Puritans  “the  deliverers  of  England,  the 
founders  of  the  American  Commonwealths,”  nevertheless 
has  the  manful  courage  to  confess  that  the  attempt  of  the 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


183 

later  Puritans  to  make  men  moral  by  Act  of  Parliament 
was  fatal  to  the  progress  of  virtue.  Hypocrisy  crept  in; 
“the  short-sighted  policy  which  aimed  at  making  a  nation 
of  saints  has  made  a  nation  of  scoffers” ;  and,  as  usual, 
the  nation  “rushes  to  the  extreme  opposite  to  that  which 
it  quits.” 

This  reaction  outlasted  the  ignominious  reign  of 
Charles  the  Second  and  was  busy  with  English  character 
under  Queen  Anne  in  the  opening  years  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  But  with  the  progress  of  that  great  century  the 
English  mind  gradually  steadied  itself,  and,  avoiding  the 
excesses  both  of  the  Puritan  and  the  Cavalier,  addressed 
itself  to  those  two  supreme  issues  of  human  life  with 
which  evolution  appears  chiefly  to  be  concerned,  namely, 
conduct  and  knowledge. 

Bossuet  inferred  from  the  very  variety  of  opinions 
among  mankind  that,  saving  one,  all  should  be  suppressed. 
On  hearing  of  religious  toleration  in  Holland,  he  ex¬ 
claimed,  “Happy  country,  where  the  heretic  is  at  rest  as 
well  as  the  orthodox,  where  vipers  are  preserved  like 
doves  and  innocent  animals,  where  those  who  compound 
poisons  enjoy  the  same  tranquillity  with  those  who  pre¬ 
pare  remedies.”  The  logic  of  this  irony  was  felt  as  keenly 
by  the  Puritan  as  the  Papist.  It  was  founded  on  an  as¬ 
sumption  which  had  been  current  in  the  European  mind 
for  more  than  a  thousand  years,  the  assumption  that  a 
man’s  opinion  concerning  the  Christian  religion  will  de¬ 
termine  his  destiny  after  death  for  ever  and  ever. 


184 


SEVEN  AGES 


The  first  vital  attack  on  this  assumption  was  delivered 
by  John  Locke,  born  in  1632,  six  years  after  the  death 
of  Bacon.  Brought  up  in  Puritan  principles,  he  remained 
a  severe  moralist  to  the  day  of  his  death  in  1704,  dying 
with  the  words  of  a  Psalm  in  his  ears,  read  to  him  by  his 
friend  Lady  Masham,  after  having  spent  the  last  four 
years  of  his  life  in  a  study  of  the  Bible.  But  deeply  as 
his  soul  was  disposed  to  religion,  the  chief  inspiration  of 
his  mind  was  a  courageous  curiosity  concerning  physical 
phenomena.  The  works  of  Descartes  fired  him  as  a  youth 
with  enthusiasm  for  common  sense  in  philosophy.  Medi¬ 
cine,  so  powerfully  influenced  by  Servetus  and  William 
Harvey,  attracted  him  as  offering  an  explanation  of  the 
human  body,  chemistry  as  promising  a  revelation  of  the 
mystery  of  the  universe;  for  a  number  of  years  he  kept 
a  journal  of  his  observation  of  weather  changes  by  means 
of  the  barometer,  thermometer,  and  hygrometer.  These 
philosophical  and  scientific  studies,  and  his  interest  as  a 
man  of  the  world  in  the  government  of  states,  induced 
him  to  write  two  pamphlets  which  have  had  a  profound 
political  influence,  and  an  essay  which  turned  European 
thought  into  a  new  channel. 

Locke  opposed  himself  to  the  theory  that  kings  have 
a  right  to  the  unquestioning  obedience  of  their  subjects, 
and  laid  it  down,  with  the  old  counsellors  consulted  by 
Rehoboam,  that  government  can  only  be  just  and  rational 
when  it  is  in  the  interest  of  those  who  are  governed,  that 
is  to  say,  when  it  is  the  servant  of  mankind  and  not  its 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


185 


master.  It  has  been  said  of  him  that  in  these  treatises 
on  Government  and  Toleration  he  lays  the  foundations  of 
the  civil  liberty  and  the  religious  freedom  “of  which  the 
subsequent  history  of  the  British  Empire  records  the 
gradual  application.” 

But  the  greatest  of  his  benefits  was  the  freedom  from 
scholasticism  and  the  robust  English  good  sense  which 
he  brought  to  the  modern  study  of  philosophy.  For 
twenty  years  he  worked  on  his  immortal  Essay  concern¬ 
ing  Human  Understanding,  which  was  finished  in  1686, 
the  same  year  in  which  Newton  finished  his  Principia.  It 
was  published  in  1690,  and  by  the  beginning  of  the  eight¬ 
eenth  century  was  working  in  men’s  minds  throughout 
the  length  and  breadth  of  Europe.  Bossuet  might  well 
have  cited  it  as  proceeding  from  the  dispensary  of  a 
poisoner,  for  it  produced  followers  who  were  at  sword’s 
point  with  one  another,  and  enthusiasts  whose  reasons  for 
enthusiasm  were  poles  asunder;  but  its  great  achieve¬ 
ment  lay  in  freeing  men’s  minds  from  the  dogmatism 
of  authority,  and  setting  those  enfranchised  minds  to 
ask  themselves  the  most  primitive  and  therefore  the  most 
fruitful  questions  concerning  themselves  and  the  universe 
about  them. 

How  do  we  know  things?  How  do  we  know  right 
from  wrong?  How  do  we  arrive  at  our  ideas?  This 
mind,  which  is  to  decide  for  weal  or  for  woe  my  eternal 
destiny,  what  do  I  know  about  it  ?  What  are  the  grounds 
of  opinion,  what  is  the  nature  of  knowledge? 


SEVEN  AGES 


1 86 

Locke  decided  against  the  idea  that  we  are  born  either 
with  knowledge  of  our  destiny  or  equipment  for  our 
warfare.  He  argued  that  our  knowledge  is  the  result  of 
experience.  We  learn  as  we  go  along;  truth  is  something 
to  be  discovered,  not  something  which  is  handed  down 
with  our  minds.  He  distinguishes  between  what  the  brain 
may  attempt  to  know  and  what  it  cannot  hope  to  know. 
He  distinguishes  also  between  the  primary  qualities  of 
a  thing,  such  as  its  form  and  density,  and  its  secondary 
qualities,  such  as  its  colour  or  its  heat,  which  do  not 
properly  belong  to  it.  He  denies  that  we  are  born  with  a 
knowledge  of  God,  but  asserts  that  the  existence  of  God 
can  be  proved  from  rational  observation  of  the  universe. 
The  very  fact  that  a  child  is  not  born  with  the  idea  of 
God  implies  that  there  are  no  such  things  as  innate  ideas. 

We  cannot  stop  to  inquire  whether  this  philosophy  is 
either  shallow  or  inconsistent.  We  are  concerned  onlv 
with  its  contemporary  effect.  Locke,  like  Socrates,  it  is 
said,  “has  moved  philosophical  thought  in  the  most  oppo¬ 
site  directions,  to  the  most  various  results,  while  both 
Socrates  in  Greece  and  Locke  in  Europe,  by  their  earnest 
and  unsystematic  discourse,  have  aroused  the  two  most 
powerful  manifestations  of  reflection  which  the  world 
has  yet  seen.” 

One  of  his  effects  was  to  plunge  religion  into  the  philo¬ 
sophical  cauldron  of  theology,  setting  it  to  think  rather 
than  to  act,  to  defend  its  position  rather  than  transmit  its 
fire.  A  large  part  of  the  history  of  the  eighteenth  century 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


187 

is  occupied  by  theological  controversies  which  no  longer 
interest  mankind.  These  controversies  arose  not  only 
from  Locke’s  Essay  itself,  but  indirectly  from  the  various 
effects  of  that  Essay  on  the  minds  of  other  men.  He 
hatched  far  more  than  his  own  chickens.  Scepticism,  as 
we  now  understand  that  ambiguous  term,  was  born  of 
Locke’s  inquiry.  If  the  idealist  Bishop  Berkeley  was  a 
disciple  of  Locke,  Hume  was  his  student.  Leibnitz  and 
Kant  were  both  inspired  by  Locke,  and  so  was  Voltaire. 

It  seemed,  in  the  end,  as  if  man  would  accept  the 
theory  of  a  God,  but  only  the  Aristotelian  God  of  whom 
he  could  know  nothing,  and  whose  interest  in  the  for¬ 
tunes  of  a  trivial  planet  must  obviously  be  very  slight. 
The  Christianity  of  Sir  Isaac  Newton  had  no  effect  on  the 
intellectual  life  of  his  generation,  but  his  astronomy  in¬ 
fluenced  the  entire  world  and  was  a  plank  in  the  platform 
of  Deism.  Gone  was  the  idea  of  this  earth  as  the  centre 
of  things,  with  all  the  starry  universe  for  its  satellite; 
gone,  too,  was  the  notion  of  things  happening  by  the 
active  will  of  an  ever  watchful  Providence.  The  greater 
man  became  in  moral  stature  and  intellectual  power,  the 
less  reason  he  discovered  for  thinking  of  himself  as  the 
lord  of  creation. 

The  problem  arose,  What  was  to  become  of  virtue? 
What  was  to  be  the  new  authority  in  human  life?  The 
most  notable  answer  was  given  by  the  Lord  Shaftesbury 
of  that  day.  He  accused  the  Church  of  blaspheming  both 


SEVEN  AGES 


1 88 

God  and  Man.  The  idea  of  reward  and  punishment 
awoke  his  indignation.  What  value  is  there  in  goodness 
that  fears  the  punitive  consequences  of  evil?  “There  is 
no  more  of  rectitude,  piety,  or  sanctity  in  a  creature  thus 
reformed  than  there  is  of  weakness  or  gentleness  in  a 
tiger  strongly  chained,  or  innocence  and  sobriety  in  a 
monkey  under  the  discipline  of  the  whip.”  He  rejected 
with  disdain  the  theological  dogma  of  human  corruption. 
There  is  in  man,  he  said,  a  “moral  sense,”  inventing  that 
useful  term  to  account  for  the  power  in  man  which  makes, 
even  against  his  own  inclination,  for  righteousness. 
“Should  anyone  ask  me,  why  I  would  avoid  being  nasty 
when  nobody  was  present,  I  should  think  him  a  very  nasty 
gentleman  to  ask  the  question.  If  he  insisted,  I  should 
reply,  Because  I  have  a  nose.” 

Unfortunately,  France  was  to  prove  at  the  end  of  the 
century,  like  Russia  at  the  beginning  of  the  present  cen¬ 
tury,  that  the  world  is  full  of  “nasty  gentlemen,”  and  that 
in  vast  numbers  of  the  human  race  “moral  sense”  works 
in  anything  but  a  moral  way.  Leave  conduct  in  the 
sphere  of  taste,  destroy  its  religious  roots,  and  you  get 
your  Lenins  and  De  Valeras.  England,  it  is  true,  escaped 
the  dreadful  and  atrocious  horrors  of  the  French  Revolu¬ 
tion,  but  she  escaped  that  punishment  for  her  sins  because 
her  people  were  just  then  very  seriously  occupied  with  an 
effort  to  escape  from  them.  Nothing  in  his  own  day 
occurred  to  shake  Shaftesbury’s  faith  in  his  thesis,  but 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


189 


later  events  might  surely  have  convinced  him  either  that 
the  nose  reports  very  differently  to  the  brain  or  that  the 
interpreting  brain  is  hardly  to  be  trusted  with  the  free¬ 
dom  of  the  nose. 

Pierced  to  its  centre,  this  philosophy  reduces  morality 
to  a  question  of  taste.  He  judges  a  man,  says  Leslie 
Stephen,  “as  a  critic  would  judge  of  the  harmony  of 
a  pictorial  or  a  musical  composition.”  When  he  gives 
us  his  canons  of  criticism,  in  place  of  a  moral  rule, 
“we  feel  that  he  is  a  rather  poor  substitute  for  St.  Paul 
or  Marcus  Aurelius.”  Emerson  said  of  the  Anglican 
Church  in  the  nineteenth  century  that  the  doctrine  it 
preached  was,  “By  taste  ye  are  saved.” 

Something  deeper,  something  stronger,  above  all  some¬ 
thing  infinitely  simpler  was  necessary  just  then  for  the 
salvation  of  England. 

Great  names  in  the  eighteenth  century  are  legion.  And 
almost  each  of  those  great  names  stands  for  something 
definite  in  the  region  of  intellect.  I  need  mention  but  a 
few  to  remind  the  reader  of  the  grandeur  of  those  days. 
Newton  lived  for  twenty-seven  years  in  this  country. 
Edmund  Halley  and  James  Bradley  continued  his  revolu¬ 
tion  until  England  led  the  world  in  astronomical  science. 
Dr.  Johnson  was  one  of  the  most  loveable  and  honourable 
figures  of  the  century.  Hume  and  Gibbon  are  among  its 
most  formidable  names.  Hogarth  is  perhaps  its  best 
historian.  Burke  is  one  of  its  most  noble  orators. 


190 


SEVEN  AGES 


Handel  is  there.  Reynolds  and  Gainsborough  are  there. 
William  Law,  Chillingworth,  Stillingfleet,  Berkeley, 
Tillotson,  Warburton,  who  boasted  that  he  had  trimmed 
Hume’s  jacket,  William  Wake,  Bishop  Butler,  Paley, 
Hoadley,  are  there.  Addison  is  there,  with  a  beauty, 
delicacy,  tenderness,  and  a  radiance  hitherto  unknown  in 
English  literature.  Swift  is  there  with  a  new  irony, 
Daniel  Defoe  with  a  new  realism,  Adam  Smith  with 
a  new  philosophy,  and  John  Howard  is  there,  too,  with 
a  new  philanthropy.  Fielding,  Goldsmith,  Sterne,  Rich¬ 
ardson,  and  Smollett  belonged  to  this  Augustan  Age, 
as  do  Pope,  Gray,  Burns,  Cowper,  and  Sheridan.  As  if 
this  was  not  riches  enough  for  England,  the  same  age 
saw  the  birth  of  Shelley,  Coleridge,  and  Wordsworth. 

Mark  Pattison  denounces  the  early  years  of  this  cen¬ 
tury  as  an  age  destitute  of  faith  and  earnestness — “an 
age  whose  poetry  was  without  romance,  whose  philosophy 
was  without  insight,  and  whose  public  men  were  without 
character.”  Mr.  Augustine  Birrell  agrees;  it  was  a  brutal 
age : 

“  ...  an  age  of  the  press-gang,  of  the  whipping¬ 
post,  of  gaol- fever,  and  all  the  horrors  of  the  criminal 
code;  an  ignorant  age,  when  the  population,  lords  and 
louts  alike,  drank  with  great  freedom  and  reckoned  cock- 
fighting  among  the  more  innocent  joys  of  life;  when  edu¬ 
cation  of  the  kind  called  popular,  or,  more  correctly, 
primary  .  .  .  was  hardly  thought  of;  a  corrupt  age. 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


191 


when  offices  and  votes  were  bought  and  sold,  and  bishops 
owed  their  sees  to  the  King’s  women.” 

During  the  first  thirteen  years  of  the  century,  in  Lon¬ 
don  alone  242  criminals  were  hanged  at  Tyburn;  ‘‘women 
were  strangled  and  their  bodies  burnt  for  petit  treason, 
that  is,  the  murder  of  husbands,  and  coining.  Men  and 
women  were  put  in  the  pillory,  especially  for  seditious 
libel,  and  were  sometimes  killed  by  the  ill-usage  of  the 
mobs.  The  discipline  in  the  navy  and  army,  always 
severe  became  incredibly  harsh  with  the  introduction  of 
German  methods  during  the  Seven  Years’  War.” 

So  writes  Mr.  I.  S.  Leadam  in  The  Political  History 
of  England,  who  tells  us  that  for  the  first  sixty  years  of 
the  century  commerce  and  industry  were  depressed,  agri¬ 
culture  was  at  a  standstill,  and  all  trade  was  much  im¬ 
peded  by  the  founderous  condition  of  the  roads.  Goods 
were  carried  by  pack-horses  because  tradesmen  and  mer¬ 
chants  could  not,  like  the  nobility,  afford  a  retinue  of 
servants  to  pull  carriages  out  of  the  ruts;  the  gentry  made 
their  journey  by  horseback,  carrying  their  ladies  on  pil¬ 
lions.  Public  coaches  became  commoner  in  the  reign  of 
the  First  George,  “but  they  could  not  make  more  than 
about  five  miles  an  hour,  and  were  commonly  drawn  by 
six  horses  with  postillions.”  Stage-wagons  took  ten  days 
in  summer  and  eleven  in  winter  to  travel  between  Lan¬ 
cashire  and  London.  “A  journey  without  accident  was 
scarcely  expected.  To  the  risk  of  being  upset  was  added 


192 


SEVEN  AGES 


the  risk  of  being  plundered.  It  was  the  golden  age  of 
the  highwaymen,  of  whom  the  best  known  to  fame, 
Richard  Turpin,  was  executed  at  York  in  1739.” 

“The  dangers  of  the  streets  of  London,  their  filthy 
state,  the  streams  from  the  gutter  spouts,  the  pestilential 
‘kennel/  the  scanty  light  from  the  lanterns  and  oil-lamps 
at  night  was  much  the  same  in  1760  as  when  Gay  wrote 
Trivia  in  1715.  But  these  inconveniences  were  trifling 
compared  to  the  risk  of  being  tormented  by  brawling  men 
of  fashion  called  ‘Mohocks’  and  ‘Hawkubites/  or  robbed 
and  murdered  by  the  footpads  who  molested  unfrequented 
thoroughfares.” 

To  these  details,  Mr.  Leadam  adds  a  useful  catalogue 
of  fashion.  In  1746  an  Admiral  paid  £51  5^.  id.  and 
£75  8s.  for  two  embroidered  waistcoats.  “Swift  com¬ 
plained  of  paying  three  guineas  for  a  wig;  a  beau  would 
pay  forty.”  Physicians  carried  a  muff  to  conserve  the 
temperature  of  their  hands.  Barristers  and  clergymen 
wore  their  robes  and  gowns  in  the  street,  while  certain 
young  swaggerers  among  the  clergy  paraded  the  town 
in  the  scarves  of  doctors  of  divinity.  Tradesmen  aped 
the  gentry,  and  wore  laced  hats,  swords,  and  wigs  tied 
with  ribbon.  The  wire  frames  of  ladies’  head-dresses  fell 
by  a  change  of  fashion  a  matter  of  two  feet.  Hoops 
varied  only  in  shape,  not  in  size :  they  were  prodigious. 
Lace  shirts  and  ruffles  were  worn  by  men,  who  kissed 
themselves  in  greeting.  A  certain  formality  marked  the 
affections  of  domestic  life.  “Sons  and  daughters,  even 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


193 


when  of  mature  years,  knelt  both  in  public  and  in  private 
for  their  parents’  blessing.” 

We  have  Mr.  William  Hunt’s  authority  for  the  follow¬ 
ing  facts :  Till  the  end  of  the  century  thefts  above  the 
value  of  twelve  pence  were  punishable  by  hanging.  As 
late  as  1773  a  woman  was  strangled  and  burnt  at  the 
stake,  20,000  people  looking  on.  Women  were  whipped 
in  public.  Ninety-six  persons  were  hanged  at  the  Old 
Bailey  in  ten  months.  Men,  women,  and  children  were 
huddled  together  in  prisons  which  had  no  sewers  and 
no  water  supply.  Forty  thousand  people  were  engaged 
in  the  smuggling  trade,  and  two-thirds  of  the  tea  and  half 
the  brandy  consumed  in  England  paid  no  duty.  The 
magistrates  were  corrupt.  The  police  force  was  so  in¬ 
sufficient  that  footpads  robbed  carriages  in  Grosvenor 
Square  and  Piccadilly.  “Riots  were  frequent  in  times  of 
scarcity  or  popular  excitement,  and  often  could  only  be 
quelled  by  soldiers.” 

On  the  other  side  of  the  picture  are  the  following 
virtues  rightly  and  humorously  emphasised  by  Mr. 
Birrell : 

“During  the  eighteenth  century  our  two  Universities, 
famous  despite  their  faults,  were  always  open  to  the 
poor  scholar,  who  was  ready  to  subscribe,  not  to  boat 
clubs  or  cricket  jclubs,  but  to  the  Thirty-Nine  Articles. 
Three  Archbishops  of  Canterbury  during  the  eighteenth 
century  were  the  sons  of  small  tradesmen.  There  was. 


194 


SEVEN  AGES 


in  fact,  much  less  snobbery  and  money-worship  during 
the  century  when  the  British  Empire  was  being  won  than 
during  the  century  when  it  is  being  talked  about.” 

The  religious  state  of  the  country  may  be  judged  from 
the  fact  that  many  bishops  never  visited  their  dioceses, 
and  that  there  were  numerous  parishes  without  a  resident 
clergyman.  Christianity,  even  in  its  outward  forms, 
says  Mr.  D.  C.  Somervell,  was  apparently  extinct  in  cer¬ 
tain  places.  At  Haworth,  in  Yorkshire,  “the  dead  were 
buried  with  drunken  orgies,  but  with  no  burial  service.” 
The  village  was  haunted  by  a  phantom  dog  which  was 
supposed  to  roam  the  moors  at  night — those  moors  over 
which  Charlotte  and  Emily  Bronte  walked  in  after  years. 

It  was  into  this  age,  born  in  the  year  1703,  that  John 
Wesley  came  with  a  message  wholly  different  from  that 
of  either  the  contemporary  theologians  or  the  contem¬ 
porary  philosophers,  but  strangely  alike  both  to  the  mes¬ 
sage  of  Socrates  and  the  message  of  Jesus.  The  essayist 
whom  I  have  just  quoted  calls  him  “the  greatest  force  of 
the  eighteenth  century  in  England.”  Historians,  he  says, 
have  dismissed  him  curtly;  but  “the  fact  is,  Wesley  puts 
your  ordinary  historian  out  of  conceit  with  himself.” 

“No  man  lived  nearer  the  centre  than  John  Wesley, 
neither  Clive  nor  Pitt,  neither  Mansfield  nor  Johnson. 
You  cannot  cut  him  out  of  our  national  life.  No  single 
figure  influenced  so  many  minds,  no  single  voice  touched 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


195 


so  many  hearts.  No  other  man  did  such  a  life’s  work  for 
England.” 

It  is  far  easier  for  the  historian,  he  says,  to  weave  into 
his  page  “the  gossip  of  Horace  Walpole,  to  enliven  it 
with  a  heartless  jest  of  George  Selwyn’s,  to  make  it  blush 
with  sad  stories  of  the  extravagance  of  Fox,  to  embroider 
it  with  the  rhetoric  of  Burke,  to  humanise  it  with  the 
talk  of  Johnson  .  .  .  than  to  follow  John  Wesley  into 
the  streets  of  Bristol  or  on  to  the  bleak  moors  near 
Burslem,  where  he  met  face  to  face  in  all  their  violence, 
all  their  ignorance,  and  all  their  generosity  the  living  men, 
women,  and  children  who  made  up  the  nation.”  1 

Of  Robert  Southey’s  Life  of  John  Wesley  Macaulay 
said :  “Defective  as  it  is,  it  contains  the  only  popular  ac¬ 
count  of  a  most  remarkable  moral  revolution  and  of  a 
man  whose  eloquence  and  logical  acuteness  might  have 
made  him  eminent  in  literature,  whose  genius  in  govern¬ 
ment  was  not  inferior  to  that  of  Richelieu,  and  who, 
whatever  his  errors  may  have  been,  devoted  all  his 
powers,  in  defiance  of  obloquy  and  derision,  to  what  he 
sincerely  considered  as  the  highest  good  of  his  species.” 

For  forty  years,  mostly  on  horseback,  Wesley  “con¬ 
tested  the  three  kingdoms  in  the  cause  of  Christ,”  cover¬ 
ing  many  more  miles  than  Dick  Turpin,  and  paying 
“more  turnpikes  than  any  man  who  ever  bestrode  a 
beast.”  For  many  a  long  year,  and  over  those  founder- 


1  Miscellanies,  pp.  13,  14. 


196 


SEVEN  AGES 


ous  roads,  8,000  miles  was  the  annual  record  of  this 
scholarly  and  delicate  clergyman,  of  whom  his  parson 
father  had  declared  in  1726,  “Whatever  I  am,  my  Jack 
is  Fellow  of  Lincoln.” 

If  we  inquire  how  it  was  he  came  to  ride  horseback 
through  the  eighteenth  century,  how  it  was  he  did  not 
remain  a  Fellow  of  Lincoln,  or  proceed  quietly  from  a 
country  rectory  to  an  episcopal  palace,  we  shall  discover 
a  certain  secret  in  the  religion  of  Christianity  which  had 
escaped  the  notice  of  almost  every  professional  commen¬ 
tator  and  accredited  theologian  from  its  earliest  begin¬ 
nings — a  secret  which  lends  itself  to  every  age  because 
it  is  not  bound  by  theological  opinion  or  tied  to  any  par¬ 
ticular  mode  of  worship. 

Some  of  the  mystics  possessed  themselves  of  this  secret, 
but  few  of  them  shared  it  with  the  world.  John  Bunyan 
made  a  characteristically  English  effort  to  share  it  with 
mankind,  and  George  Fox  organised  a  society  to  per¬ 
petuate  its  knowledge.  But  none  of  these  saw  so  clearly 
as  Wesley  did,  or  with  so  consuming  a  compassion  for 
those  without  its  knowledge,  that  this  secret  was  of  ut¬ 
most  importance  to  human  life,  and  that  its  knowledge 
was  to  be  carried  to  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men,  even 
to  the  most  ignorant,  the  most  degraded,  and  the  most 
powerless. 

This  secret  has  the  character  of  all  substantial  great¬ 
ness  in  that  it  is  quite  simple.  It  is  a  revelation  to  man 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


197 


that  religion  is  a  power  personal  to  the  individual  soul: 
that  it  is  not  a  verbal  assent  to  a  number  of  difficult  meta¬ 
physical  propositions,  nor  conformity  to  a  traditional  rite 
of  public  worship,  but  a  way  of  looking  at  life,  a  manner 
of  living — an  authority  in  the  mind  and  a  power  in  the 
heart.  He  saw  religion  first  as  a  choice  between  two 
roads,  and  second  as  a  destiny  here  and  hereafter.  A 
man  is  either  travelling  towards  God  or  away  from  God. 
He  is  sowing  either  wheat  or  tares.  He  can  choose  which 
he  will  do.  The  whole  history  of  man  is  determined  by  this 
decision.  To  have  faith  in  God  is  to  be  born  again,  to 
become  a  new  creature.  Surrender  the  will  to  God,  and 
the  slaveries  of  sense  drop  away  from  you:  you  are  free 
from  all  fears,  all  delusions,  all  tyrannies  of  circumstance 
or  heredity.  He  preached  a  hundred  times  from  the 
text,  “If  any  man  be  in  Christ  he  is  a  new  creature,”  and 
constantly  wrote  in  his  Journal  of  “prisoners  set  at 
liberty.”  To  him,  as  it  was  to  Socrates,  religion  meant 
a  liberation  of  the  soul  from  illusion,  an  ascent  of  the 
spirit  into  reality.  In  finding  man  a  Master,  he  found 
him  his  liberty. 

In  this  sense  Wesley  conceived  of  religion,  and  set 
out  to  rouse  the  soul  of  England  from  its  slumber  of 
death.  The  three  great  words  of  his  discourse  were 
God,  Christ,  Sin.  He  could  so  employ  these  words  that 
his  hearers  would  be  thrown  into  swoons,  would  fall 
down  as  if  dead,  would  cry  out  that  Satan  had  them  in 


1 98 


SEVEN  AGES 


his  grip,  and  yet  he  never  ranted,  never  descended  to  in¬ 
timidation.  It  was  his  knowledge  of  the  human  heart, 
his  sympathy  with  the  sufferings  of  mankind,  and  his 
manifest  possession  of  healing  power  which  made  those 
words  so  terrifically  real  to  the  multitude.  The  most 
neglected  and  despised  classes  of  the  nation  felt  that  God 
had  sent  them  a  messenger.  He  visited  prisons  and  en¬ 
deavoured  to  convert  the  souls  of  condemned  felons. 
Few  entries  in  his  Journal  are  more  illuminating  than 
this  on  April  2,  1740:  “Calling  at  Newgate  in  the  after¬ 
noon  I  was  informed  that  the  poor  wretches  under  sen¬ 
tence  of  death  were  earnestly  desirous  to  speak  with  me ; 
but  it  could  not  be;  Alderman  Beecher  having  just  then 
sent  an  express  order  that  they  should  not.  I  cite  Aider- 
man  Beecher  to  answer  for  these  souls  at  the  judgment- 
seat  of  Christ.”  Even  the  churches  soon  forbade  him  to 
preach  from  their  pulpits. 

Biblical  criticism  was  in  its  infancy.  His  theology 
was  the  theology  of  his  time.  He  believed  in  the  Fall 
of  Man,  in  the  inspiration  of  the  Bible,  in  the  crucifixion 
as  a  sacrifice  for  sin,  and  in  the  Thirty-Nine  Articles  of 
the  Church  of  England.  To  him,  much  more  sharply 
than  to  Sydney  Smith  or  Warburton,  who  held  this 
same  theology,  it  came  home  as  a  piercing  thought,  shat¬ 
tering  all  idea  of  ease  or  pleasure,  that  the  vast  multi¬ 
tudes  of  England  were  going  down  to  a  perdition  possibly 
eternal,  not  only  for  their  sins,  but  also  for  want  of  a 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


199 


preacher  to  tell  them  the  means  of  salvation.  He  was  a 
realist,  like  the  Puritans,  but  a  realist  who  thought  of 
other  people.  It  was  not  enough  for  him  that  he  him¬ 
self  had  entered  into  life;  he  could  not  rest  until 
he  had  brought  the  feet  of  others  into  the  way  of 
peace. 

Yet  there  was  nothing  gloomy  about  the  man,  nothing 
morbid,  nothing  that  marked  him  as  a  neurotic.  He 
parted  with  Whitefield  because  that  great  preacher  was  a 
Calvinist.  He  had  the  grace  of  a  scholar,  the  charm 
which  goes  with  a  slightly  quizzical  humour,  and  that 
immense  attraction  which  emanates  only  from  a  perfectly 
sincere  spirit.  “His  countenance,  as  well  as  conversation, 
expressed  an  habitual  gaiety  of  heart,”  says  Alexander 
Knox;  .  .  he  was,  in  truth,  the  most  perfect  specimen 
of  moral  happiness  which  I  ever  saw.”  Dr.  Johnson 
found  no  fault  with  him,  save  that  he  had  no  time  for 
talk.  “John  Wesley’s  conversation  is  good,  but  he  is 
never  at  leisure.  He  is  always  obliged  to  go  at  a  certain 
hour.  This  is  very  disagreeable  to  a  man  who  loves  to 
fold  his  legs  and  have  out  his  talk,  as  I  do.”  Wesley’s 
legs,  as  we  have  seen,  were  happier  astride  a  horse  on  his 
way  to  a  meeting.1 

There  is  a  famous  incident  connected  with  these  rides 

1  Elsewhere  Dr.  Johnson  says,  “He  can  talk  well  on  any  subject.” 
In  giving  Boswell  a  letter  of  introduction  to  Wesley  he  wrote, 
“I  think  it  very  much  to  be  wished  that  worthy  and  religious  men 
should  be  acquainted  with  each  other.” 


200 


SEVEN  AGES 


in  Wesley’s  Journal,  under  the  date  of  the  20th  May, 
1742,  which  shows  us  the  humorous  side  of  the  man: 

“The  next  afternoon  I  stopped  a  little  at  Newport  Pag- 
nell,  and  then  rode  on  till  I  overtook  a  serious  man,  with 
whom  I  immediately  fell  into  conversation.  He  presently 
gave  me  to  know  what  his  opinions  were,  therefore  I 
said  nothing  to  contradict  them.  But  that  did  not  con¬ 
tent  him.  He  was  quite  uneasy  to  know  ‘whether  I  held 
the  doctrines  of  the  decrees  as  he  did’;  but  I  told  him 
over  and  over:  ‘We  had  better  keep  to  practical  things, 
lest  we  should  be  angry  at  one  another.’  And  so  we  did 
for  two  miles,  till  he  caught  me  unawares,  and  dragged 
me  into  the  dispute  before  I  knew  where  I  was.  He  then 
grew  warmer  and  warmer ;  told  me  I  was  rotten  at  heart, 
and  supposed  I  was  one  of  John  Wesley’s  followers.  I 
told  him  ‘No.  I  am  John  Wesley  himself.’  Upon  which 

Improvisum  aspris  veluti  qui  sentibus  anguem 
Pressit,1 

he  would  gladly  have  run  away  outright,  but  being  the 
better  mounted  of  the  two  I  kept  close  to  his  side,  and 
endeavoured  to  show  him  his  heart  till  we  came  into  the 
streets  of  Northampton.” 

That  Wesley,  with  his  intense  conviction  of  the  truth 
of  religion,  should  have  preserved  this  sense  of  humour 
in  an  age  so  full  of  barren  formalism  and  downright  in¬ 
fidelity  in  the  Church  itself,  is  memorable  evidence  to 
the  beauty  of  his  character  and  the  fineness  of  his  mind. 

1As  one  who  treads  unexpectedly  on  a  snake. 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


201 


He  never  denounced  his  false  Church,  and  only  at  the 
last  and  with  the  greatest  unwillingness  ordained  minis¬ 
ters  for  the  particular  work  of  conversion.  It  is  puzzling 
how  a  man  so  earnest  could  have  held  his  peace  in  the 
presence  of  a  Church  which  so  ludicrously  misrepresented 
the  Christ  of  salvation.  Walter  Bagehot,  reviewing  the 
works  of  Laurence  Sterne,  referred  to  a  volume  of 
Yorick’s  sermons  in  these  words : 

“People  wonder  at  the  rise  of  Methodism;  but  ought 
they  to  wonder?  If  a  clergyman  publishes  his  sermons 
because  he  has  written  an  indecent  novel — a  novel  which 
is  purely  pagan — which  is  outside  the  ideas  of  Chris¬ 
tianity,  whose  author  can  scarcely  have  been  inside  of 
them — if  a  man  so  made  and  so  circumstanced  is  as  such 
to  publish  Christian  sermons,  surely  Christianity  is  a 
joke  and  a  dream.” 

On  all  sides  of  Wesley  was  religious  buffoonery, 
mockery,  coldness,  apathy,  hypocrisy,  and  self-deception 
of  a  quite  staggering  order.  But  he  retained  his  serenity, 
and  met  the  violent  abuse  of  his  brother  clergymen  with 
a  smile.  Brougham  exclaimed  in  the  House  of  Commons,, 
“How  will  the  reverend  bishops  of  the  other  House  be 
able  to  express  their  due  abhorrence  of  the  crime  of  per¬ 
jury,  who  solemnly  declare  in  the  presence  of  God  that 
when  they  are  called  upon  to  accept  a  living,  perhaps  of 
£4,000  a  year,  at  the  very  instant  they  are  moved  by  the 
Holy  Ghost  to  accept  the  office  and  administration  there- 


202 


SEVEN  AGES 


of,  and  for  no  other  reason  whatever?”  Wesley  knew 
the  condition  of  the  Church  but  he  made  no  sign  of  leav¬ 
ing  it. 

When  we  reflect  on  these  things  the  equanimity  of 
Wesley  is  amazing,  not  his  crusade.  That  crusade,  a 
searching  for  inward  truth  was  Socratic  and  was  not 
altogether  lacking  in  the  Socratic  geniality;  but  it  w&s 
heightened  and  beautified  by  the  spirit  of  Jesus.  It  was 
an  immense  effort  on  the  part  of  man’s  soul  to  escape 
from  unreality,  from  illusion,  from  self-deception,  from 
pretence,  formalism,  and  all  shallowness,  to  escape  from 
these  fetters  of  the  prison-house  into  the  clear  and  vivid 
atmosphere  of  an  honest  day.  Like  Socrates,  Wesley 
bade  men  look  within,  to  beware  of  self-deception,  to  seek 
after  their  own  inward  truth.  Like  Jesus,  he  bade  them 
believe  implicitly  in  the  fatherly  intentions  of  God.  They 
were  not  to  strive  after  their  own  salvation :  they  were 
not  to  put  their  trust  in  the  preformance  of  religious 
duties;  they  were  to  acknowledge  their  sins,  to  long 
earnestly  for  liberation,  and  to  open  wide  the  doors  of 
their  hearts  to  the  divine  influence. 

He  simplified  Christian  theology  exactly  as  Jesus  had 
simplified  the  theology  of  Judaism.  He  brought  God 
near  to  the  heart  of  every  man.  He  made  that  heart  feel 
its  need  of  God.  And  he  united  the  heart  of  God  and  the 
heart  of  man  in  the  love  manifested  on  this  earth  in  the 
heart  of  Jesus.  Life  without  God  is  animalism  and  tor- 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


203 


por;  with  God  it  is  an  ascent  into  a  region  of  quiet  joy 
and  confident  patience. 

The  success  which  attended  his  mission  is  not  an  occa¬ 
sion  for  wonderment.  Something  in  the  soul  of  man  in¬ 
stantly  responds  to  reality.  It  is  unreality  which  de¬ 
presses  men,  insincerity  which  disposes  them  to  cynicism, 
falsehood  which  renders  them  mad.  They  overthrow 
dynasties  which  enthrone  a  lie,  and  destroy  churches 
whose  altars  are  served  by  hypocrisy,  not  because  they 
hate  government  or  deny  God,  but  because  they  hate  bad 
government  and  false  deities,  and  because  their  patience 
with  unreality  is  exhausted.  Wesley’s  success  in  England 
saved  the  country  from  revolution  because  he  had  roused 
a  great  body  of  persons  in  the  nation  to  be  more  intent 
on  mending  their  own  lives  than  brooding  over  their 
grievances  or  dreaming  of  Utopias.  A  new  reality  in 
religion  visited  the  British  Isles  when  all  Europe  was 
quaking  with  revolution,  a  reality  not  to  be  taken  on 
trust  from  a  priesthood,  a  reality  which  needed  no  scholar¬ 
ship  for  its  understanding,  but  a  reality  which  each  man 
could  test  for  himself  in  the  inwardness  of  his  own  life. 
For  him  “inward  holiness”  meant  a  conscious  union  of 
the  soul  with  God. 

“God  is  near  you,  with  you,  within  you,”  wrote  Seneca. 
“This  I  say,  Lucilius;  a  holy  spirit  sits  within  us,  watches 
over  our  good  and  evil  deeds,  and  is  guardian  over  us. 
Even  as  we  treat  him,  he  treats  us.”  And  elsewhere, 


204 


SEVEN  AGES 


“Externals  are  not  within  my  power;  choice  is.  Where, 
then,  shall  I  seek  good  and  evil?  Why,  within,  in  what 
is  my  own.”  This  reality  of  Stoicism  became  in  Wesley 
a  new  Christian  reality,  an  overpowering  sense  of  an 
inward  divinity.  Men  became  shudderingly  aware  of  a 
God  within  them,  and  of  a  tremendous  disloyalty  when¬ 
ever  they  sinned  against  conscience. 

This  spirit  of  reality  worked  in  the  whole  church, 
in  the  whole  nation.  Priests  became  more  earnest,  mer¬ 
chants  and  shopkeepers  more  honest.  The  thrift  which 
the  Puritans  had  regarded  as  a  virtue  provided  British 
industry  at  a  crisis  in  its  fortunes  with  capital  which  en¬ 
abled  it  to  increase  the  national  wealth  amazingly,  in  spite 
of  the  loss  of  the  American  colonies.  Politics  became 
more  serious  as  a  new  philanthropy  exposed  the  terrible 
conditions  of  social  life.  The  fox-hunting  and  port¬ 
drinking  parson  became  something  of  a  scandal.  The 
priest  who  made  fun  of  the  Methodist  preachers  began 
to  be  more  careful  about  his  own  sermons.  A  corrupt 
magistrate  learned  to  fear  a  new  thing  in  life — the 
social  conscience  of  England.  Cruelty  and  injustice  con¬ 
tinued  to  exist,  and  far  into  the  next  century  the  wealth 
of  England  was  stained  with  the  sufferings  of  children 
and  the  greed  of  manufacturers ;  but  vested  interests  were 
now  conscious  of  a  struggle  ahead  of  them;  for  evan¬ 
gelicalism  was  binding  the  flower  of  the  working-classes 
into  unions,  the  schoolmaster,  thanks  to  Robert  Raikes, 
was  abroad,  and  a  living  sympathy  between  the  privileged 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


205 


and  the  depressed  classes,  unlike  anything  that  had  hither¬ 
to  existed,  was  growing  rapidly  out  of  the  ministrations 
of  an  evangelical  church. 

The  political  consequences  of  this  movement  were  im¬ 
portant.  In  every  sphere  of  human  activity  there  was 
now  an  authority  greater  than  the  law  of  the  land — the 
law  of  the  conscience,  the  moral  law,  the  law  of  God. 
This  supreme  authority  of  conscience  was  a  commonplace 
of  seventeenth-century  Independents  and  of  other  Puritan 
sects,  but  it  became  a  tremendous  power  after  Wesley. 
There  was  no  foreground  in  the  national  life  without  this 
background.  Everything  now  could  be  appraised  by  a 
standard,  judged  by  a  principle.  Chaos  and  confusion 
gave  way  to  a  new  and  imperative  urge.  The  nation 
seemed  to  have  received  its  marching  orders.  Its  disci¬ 
pline  was  the  loyalty  of  each  man's  heart  to  the  voice  of 
God.  Its  music  was  the  English  Bible. 

When  the  Revolution  came  in  France,  it  roused  in 
moral  England  a  feeling  of  horror  and  loathing.  When 
the  Napoleonic  menace  darkened  the  sky,  the  whole  na¬ 
tion  felt  itself  as  one  man  in  its  determination  to  destroy 
the  destroyer.  A  flood  of  evangelical  feeling  carried  Eng¬ 
land  from  the  eighteenth  century  far  into  the  nineteenth, 
and  withdrew  only  when  its  living  impulse  had  hardened 
into  a  tradition,  weakened  by  materialistic  prosperity,  and 
intimidated  by  the  challenge  of  a  new  theory  in  biology. 

Inwardness  came  to  be  a  word,  new-birth  a  matter  of 
form;  the  rigidity  of  institutionalism  killed  personal  re- 


2  o6 


SEVEN  AGES 


ligion.  Conversion  was  discredited  by  the  hysteria  and 
vulgarity  which  marked  most  of  the  efforts  at  its  revival. 
Men  turned  away  from  themselves  and  attended  to  ex¬ 
terior  nature.  Socrates  and  Plato  were  forgotten.  Aris¬ 
totle  ruled.  The  moral  law  lost  its  authority,  and  the  will 
to  power  took  the  place  of  conscience.  There  was  still 
in  many  places  a  lip  service  to  idealism,  but  materialism 
ruled  human  existence,  and  1914  came  to  tell  mankind 
that  it  was  on  a  wrong  road. 

“One  may  say  that  the  whole  development  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  in  inwardness,”  writes  William  James,  “has  con¬ 
sisted  in  little  more  than  the  greater  and  greater  emphasis 
attached  to  this  crisis  of  self-surrender.  From  Catho¬ 
licism  to  Lutheranism,  and  then  to  Calvinism;  from  that 
to  Wesleyanism;  and  from  this,  outside  of  technical 
Christianity  altogether,  to  pure  ‘Liberalism’  or  trans¬ 
cendental  idealism,  whether  or  not  of  the  mind-cure  type, 
taking  in  the  mediaeval  mystics,  the  quietists,  the  pietists, 
and  quakers  by  the  way,  we  can  trace  the  stages  of  pro¬ 
gress  towards  the  idea  of  an  immediate  spiritual  help, 
experienced  by  the  individual  in  his  forlornness  and 
standing  in  no  essential  need  of  doctrinal  apparatus  or 
propitiatory  machinery.”  1 

Whether  Christianity  is  to  develop  in  this  direction 
remains  to  be  seen.  If  not,  where  are  men  to  look  for 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  pp.  210,  21 1. 


THE  AGE  OF  WESLEY 


20  7 


authority,  for  principles,  for  standards?  Certainly  it 
appears  as  if  organised  religion,  clinging  to  phrases  and 
to  forms  which  have  lost  all  sharpness  of  reality  for  the 
great  bulk  of  mankind,  is  not  likely  to  play  any  creative 
part  in  the  present  chapter  of  the  human  epic.  Men  are 
too  busy  to  bother  their  head  with  echoes.  “The  spirit 
that  dwelt  in  this  Church,”  said  Emerson,  “has  glided 
away  to  animate  other  activities;  and  they  who  come  to 
the  old  shrines  find  apes  and  players  rustling  the  old  gar¬ 
ments.”  Christianity  has  no  right  to  forms  until  it  has 
created  Christendom.  It  is  not  the  curator  of  a  museum, 
but  a  vital  principle  of  evolution.  Its  business  is  not  to 
guard  and  to  treasure,  but  to  permeate  and  transform. 
Until  it  recognises  this  truth,  humanity  must  look  else¬ 
where  for  a  principle  of  existence  which  can  make  virtue 
a  power  and  bind  the  disintegrating  tendencies  of  anarchy. 

To  one  who  reads  history  as  the  narrative  of  the 
human  mind  groping  its  heroic  way  from  the  imposition 
of  its  own  senses  and  the  manifold  deceits  of  exterior 
nature  towards  that  invisible  Reality  which  seems  to  call 
to  it  from  the  hidden  fertility  of  the  future,  it  must  ap¬ 
pear  inconceivable  that  the  ethical  ideas  of  Jesus  should 
ever  lose  their  meaning,  and  that  the  Personality  of  Jesus 
should  ever  cease  from  haunting  the  heart  of  man  and 
pleading  with  his  conscience. 

In  the  darkness  of  that  materialism  which  returns 
again  and  again  to  the  earth,  which  is  always  strong  but 


208 


SEVEN  AGES 


never  so  strong  as  after  a  period  of  spiritual  exhaustion, 
there  is  no  voice  so  likely  to  call  men  back  to  the  truth 
of  their  existence  as  that  tender,  compassionate,  but  un¬ 
compromising  Voice  which  religious  intolerance  has 
never  silenced  and  religious  excitement  has  never 
drowned.  The  torch  of  science  may  light  up  for  man¬ 
kind  the  darkness  which  surrounds  it,  but  held  in  the  hand 
of  an  animal,  with  no  thesis  of  existence  and  with  no 
logic  but  self-indulgence,  it  can  but  lead  the  way  to  an¬ 
other  wilderness  and  to  another  Armageddon.  Something 
more  is  necessary  to  ensure  the  peace  of  man’s  mental 
journey. 

Certain  elements  in  Christianity,  it  is  argued,  give  it 
a  permanent  value — “the  conception  of  God  as  love — the 
full  implication  of  which  has  never  yet  been  realised — 
the  conception  of  man  as  spiritual  and  akin  to  God,  the 
conception  of  human  life  as  eternal.”  This  is  true.  But 
one  wonders  whether,  for  the  present  generation  at  least, 
Christianity  possesses  either  attraction  or  interest.  That 
is  the  first  question  which  confronts  us  in  looking  for¬ 
ward  to  the  immediate  future  of  civilisation.  The  next 
fifty  years  may  decide  the  character  of  the  next  three 
centuries. 


CONCLUSION 


209 


CONCLUSION 


In  the  introduction  to  this  brief  chronicle  of  mental 
travel  it  was  suggested  that  if  our  rights  and  privileges 
have  been  purchased  by  the  past,  some  at  least  of  our 
obligations  and  duties  belong  to  the  future. 

Among  those  obligations  and  duties,  if  our  reading 
of  history  is  a  true  one,  is  the  obligation  to  think  ration¬ 
ally  and  the  duty  to  think  effectively. 

This  proposition  will  appear  as  a  truth  even  to  the 
most  careless  reader  if  he  reflect  for  a  moment  on  the 
only  propulsive  force  which  bears  the  children  of  men 
from  one  epoch  to  another  and  from  the  bewilderments 
of  illusion  to  the  confidence  of  reality. 

There  is  no  “river  of  time”  in  the  geography  of  human 
experience :  no  “stream  of  tendency”  outside  the  realm  of 
metaphor.  The  one  flood  which  bears  men  from  change 
to  change  flows  only  in  the  human  mind.  The  rhetorical 
Time  Spirit  is  neither  ghost  nor  ministering  angel,  but  the 
thought  of  the  human  brain.  We  make  our  destiny  by 
our  thinking,  and  the  only  determinism  in  nature  is  fur¬ 
nished  by  the  verdicts  of  the  mind.  The  pourse  of  his¬ 
tory  is  the  course  of  thought. 


211 


212 


SEVEN  AGES 


When  a  man  perceives  that  the  motive-power  in  the 
affairs  of  mortality  proceeds  from  the  brain,  and  that  the 
only  force  of  evolution  is  the  invisible  energy  of  ideas, 
we  may  logically  expect  of  him  the  realisation  that  it  is 
among  his  obligations  to  think  rationally.  Again,  when 
he  perceives  how  constantly  the  progress  of  humanity  has 
been  checked  and  even  hurled  far  backward  towards  bar¬ 
barism  by  wrong  thinking,  we  may  as  logically  expect 
of  him,  if  he  is  a  moral  being,  the  realisation  that  to  the 
obligation  to  think  rationally  must  be  added  the  duty  to 
think  effectively. 

To  think  wrongly  may  be  disastrous,  but  it  is  not  crimi¬ 
nal.  To  think  indifferently,  on  the  other  hand,  is  to 
commit  a  supreme  crime  against  the  fortunes  of  human¬ 
ity.  Indecision  in  public  opinion  is  the  open  gate  through 
which  the  forces  of  nihilism  pour  into  the  citadel  of  civili¬ 
sation. 

For  the  last  fifty  years  or  so  men  have  been  thinking 
in  the  language  of  agnosticism.  They  have  shelved  many 
questions  of  cardinal  importance  to  the  dignity  of  the  hu¬ 
man  race,  and  put  absolutely  out  of  their  consideration 
a  question  which  is  essential  to  its  safety.  With  valid 
excuses  provided  for  them  by  the  quarrelsome  contro¬ 
versies  of  theologians,  they  have  shelved  such  questions 
as  the  existence  of  God,  the  nature  of  Deity,  if  Deity  in¬ 
deed  exist,  the  place  of  Jesus  in  the  history  of  religious 
thought,  and  the  persistence  of  personality  after  death. 
But  in  shelving  questions  of  this  nature,  they  have  also 


CONCLUSION 


213 


put  out  of  their  minds  the  one  question  which  is  funda¬ 
mental  to  any  rational  theory  of  existence,  namely,  the 
question  whether  the  universe  is  moral  or  non-moral. 

History  witnesses  that  agnosticism  in  this  respect  is 
fatal  to  human  life.  Men,  it  seems,  and  naturally  seems, 
must  be  for  ever  at  the  sport  of  passion  and  caprice  so* 
long  as  they  have  no  firm  opinions  concerning  the  charac¬ 
ter  of  existence.  They  cannot  expect  security  in  their 
affairs  so  long  as  they  have  no  foundation  of  any  kind 
for  their  thinking.  It  is  entirely  essential  that  they  should 
decide  whether  virtue  is  something  more  than  a  conven¬ 
ience,  and  whether  vice  is  indeed  an  enemy  to  the  happi¬ 
ness  of  mankind  and  the  fruitfulness  of  Civilisation. 

At  the  present  moment  human  thought  seems  to  be 
sliding  from  the  vigorous  agnosticism  of  the  past  genera¬ 
tion  into  a  moral  impotence  which  feels  itself  wholly  un¬ 
able  to  exert  itself  at  all,  much  less  with  decision,  on  any 
subject  of  capital  importance.  This  lassitude  of  the  mind, 
threatening  our  posterity  with  the  hideous  consequence 
of  anarchy,  is  chiefly  due,  I  think,  to  the  tyranny  exer¬ 
cised  by  science.  Any  catchword  from  the  laborious  text¬ 
books  of  physics  which  belittles  the  universe  and  degrades 
mankind  is  as  grimly  welcomed  by  the  public  conscious¬ 
ness  as  a  volume  of  biography  which  exposes  to  the 
cynical  derision  of  the  present  generation  the  flaws  in  the 
characters  of  their  fathers’  heroes.  It  would  seem  as 
if  intellectual  impotence  is  developing  one  of  the  worst 
elements  in  the  nature  of  a  degenerate,  namely,  a  posi- 


214 


SEVEN  AGES 


tive  distaste  for  all  that  is  great  and  noble,  accompanied 
by  an  eager  relish  for  all  that  is  humiliating  and  dis¬ 
gusting. 

Yet,  if  physical  science  now  had  a  popularising  and 
fighting  Huxley  for  its  prophet,  it  might  deliver  men 
from  the  depressing  philosophy  of  Darwinism.  For 
science  is  turning  its  face  from  Darwin  to  Lamarck,  find¬ 
ing  everywhere  in  the  material  universe  the  mystery  of  an 
invisible  life  which  moves  away  from  the  slavery  of  en¬ 
vironment  and  heredity  to  achieve  self-conscious  direc¬ 
tion.  Evolution  is  seen  as  a  movement  of  mind,  and  lie 
achievements  of  evolution  are  accepted  as  witnesses  to  a 
teleology  immanent  in  nature.  I  suppose  there  is  no  man 
of  any  reputation  in  science  who  now  holds  the  mob  idea 
that  a  meaningless  movement  in  matter  produced  mind 
and  that  the  universe  is  without  significance  of  any  order. 

But  it  took  thousands  of  years  to  presuade  men  that 
this  planet  is  a  sphere,  and  one  must  suppose  that  it  will 
take  thousands  of  years  before  the  human  race  unthinks 
its  convenient  Darwinism.  The  record  of  history  is  cer¬ 
tain  on  this  score,  that  it  takes  many  centuries  to  dislodge 
even  the  most  palpable  of  false  ideas  from  the  human 
mind. 

Masses  of  men  cannot  support  the  fatigue  of  thinking. 
Give  them  some  easy  formula  of  materialism,  particu¬ 
larly  such  a  formula  as  Darwinism,  which  justifies  their 
selfish  animalism,  and  they  are  content.  The  tug  of  the 
past  is  strong  in  all  but  the  saints,  and  the  only  power  for 


CONCLUSION 


215 


righteousness  in  the  life  of  many  is  the  policeman.  To 
think  what  comes  easiest,  and  to  do  what  comes  most 
natural  to  the  lower  nature  of  man,  this  is  the  happiness 
of  the  vast  majority. 

Those  of  us  who  feel  that  the  late  agony  of  the  world 
was  brought  about  in  no  small  measure  by  the  influence 
on  the  European  mind  of  such  phrases  from  physical 
science  as  “struggle  for  existence,”  “survival  of  the  fit¬ 
test,”  and  “will  to  power,”  may  well  wonder  what  worse 
evil  is  to  befall  a  generation  still  under  the  spell  of  physi¬ 
cal  science,  still  drugged  by  the  fallacies  of  materialism, 
a  generation  ceasing  every  day  to  hold  the  moral  agnos¬ 
ticism  of  its  fathers  and  inclining  itself  more  and  more 
willingly  to  the  positive  negations  of  nihilism. 

It  is  this  menace  to  posterity  which  should  rouse  every 
man  who  recognises  the  importance  of  careful  thinking 
to  realise  the  equal  importance  of  effective  thinking.  Our 
greatest  weakness  at  the  present  moment  is  the  ineffective¬ 
ness  of  good  people,  an  ineffectiveness  which  proceeds,  I 
think,  not  so  much  from  pardonable  modesty  as  from  lack 
of  imagination.  These  people  who  do  realise  the  impor¬ 
tance  of  right  thinking,  do  not,  unfortunately,  realise  that 
truth  and  goodness  have  always  been  in  a  minority,  and 
have  held  their  own  merely  by  the  superior  force  of  their 
champions.  They  do  not  realise  that  truth  and  goodness 
can  inspire  in  men  an  affection  infinitely  more  creative 
and  unconquerable  than  is  possible  to  the  deluded  vic¬ 
tims  of  flippancy  and  vice.  Nor  do  they  realise  that  this 


2l6 


SEVEN  AGES 


affection  can  command  their  lives  only  if  it  is  courag¬ 
eously  opposed  to  the  enemy  of  man’s  peace. 

Something  might  be  done  to  quicken  the  imagination 
of  those  who  now  sorrowfully  follow  the  neglected  ban¬ 
ners  of  truth  and  goodness  if  it  were  more  insistently 
published  to  the  world  that  physical  science,  by  its  very 
nature,  can  contribute  nothing  to  the  only  thesis  of  exist¬ 
ence  which  concerns  the  human  race.  One  may  read  all 
the  text-books  of  biology  without  finding  an  explanation 
of  the  soul  of  Shakespeare,  all  the  text-books  of  chemistry 
without  finding  an  explanation  of  the  rose,  all  the  text¬ 
books  of  geology  without  finding  an  explanation  of 
beauty.  Those  things  which  come  closest  to  our  human 
life — the  affectionate  pleasure  of  personality,  the  exalta¬ 
tion  of  music  and  architecture,  the  delight  in  physical 
beauty,  the  instant  response  of  our  nature  to  the  highest 
poetry  and  the  noblest  action — these  things,  the  very  stuff 
of  our  spiritual  life,  have  no  place  in  the  investigations  of 
physical  science. 

What  is  it  that  physical  science  can  tell  us  of  the  spirit 
of  all  great  poetry  since  the  beginning  of  time,  namely, 
that  it  utters  the  longing  of  man’s  soul  for  “permanence 
amid  change,  for  security  in  unrest,”  and  that  its  use  has 
been  “to  give  some  shadow  of  satisfaction  to  the  mind 
of  man  in  those  points  wherein  the  nature  of  things  doth 
deny  it.”  This  manifest  transcendence  of  the  human 
spirit,  what  can  physical  science  say  about  it,  what  can 
it  tell  us? 


CONCLUSION 


217 


Let  us  turn  to  history,  and  as  plainly  as  the  man  of 
science  finds  evolution  in  the  physical  universe,  we  shall 
discover  there  a  movement  of  the  human  soul  from  error 
to  truth,  from  repulsiveness  to  beauty,  and  from  badness 
to  goodness.  That  movement,  that  thought  in  the  human 
mind,  is  as  greatly  a  fact  of  the  universe  as  the  sun,  the 
ocean,  and  the  atmosphere,  and  it  is  the  work  of  only  a 
few  enlightened  men  who  in  generation  after  generation 
acknowledged  the  moral  law  strove  for  beauty  and  truth 
in  the  sweat  of  their  souls,  and  were  ready  to  lay  down 
their  lives  for  their  fellow-men.  Vast  multitudes  of  weary 
or  unimaginative  men  do  not  bother  to  know  whether 
their  opinions  are  false  or  true;  intellectually  they  live 
like  lunatics;  politically  and  morally  they  constitute  a 
grave  peril  to  the  high  cause  of  civilisation.  If  this 
menace  is  to  be  averted,  those  who  seek  truth  and  desire 
goodness  must  be  more  active  in  letting  their  light  shine 
before  men. 

Many  are  the  ill-effects  of  indifference  to  serious  think¬ 
ing.  Banish  from  the  mind  of  a  generation  the  restrain¬ 
ing  and  uplifting  idea  of  moral  responsibility,  and  the 
politicians  can  see  nothing  but  economics  in  the  universe, 
the  architect  distorts  his  stone  into  an  advertisement  for 
wealth,  the  painter  and  the  musician  turn  from  beauty  to 
seek  the  eccentric  or  the  grotesque,  the  writer  desires  to 
be  precious  rather  than  useful,  the  dance  becomes  not 
an  expression  of  joy  but  an  opportunity  for  furtive  pru¬ 
rience,  and  manners  aim  to  startle,  not  to  charm,  to  shock, 


2l8 


SEVEN  AGES 


not  to  help.  Vulgarity  has  always  been  the  utterance  of 
materialism  as  loveliness  has  always  been  the  supreme 
power  in  periods  of  idealism. 

It  looks  as  though  the  mind  of  man  is  never  to  be 
trusted  when  its  eye  is  removed  from  a  far  future  and 
its  affections  rest  on  anything  which  is  near  at  hand. 
Always,  both  for  the  artist  and  the  statesman,  anarchy 
invades  when  materialism  has  driven  the  idea  of  purpose 
out  of  man’s  mind.  The  one  record  of  materialism  down 
all  the  ages  of  mankind  is  vulgarity  sliding  into  nihilism. 


THE  END 


I 


